F (programming language)

F is designed to be a minimal subset of Fortran, with only about one hundred intrinsic procedures.{{cite web |url=https://www.fortran.com/F/java.htm |title=The F Programming Language Tastes Like Java |author1=Walt Brainerd |author2=David Epstein |author3=Richard Hendrickson |accessdate=2014-04-29 |archive-date=2016-12-10 |archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20161210170923/http://www.fortran.com/F/java.htm |url-status=dead }} Language keywords and intrinsic function names are reserved keywords in F and no other names may take this exact form. F contains the same character set used in Fortran 90/95 with a limit of 132 characters. Reserved words are always written in lowercase. Any uppercase letter may appear in a character constant. Variable names do not have restriction and can include upper and lowercase characters.

F supports many of the standard operators used in Fortran. The operators supported by F are:

• Arithmetic operators: +, -, *, /, **
• Relational operators: <, <=, ==, /=, >, >=
• Logical operators: .not., .and., .or., .eqv., .neqv.
• character concatenation: //

The assignment operator is denoted by the equal sign =. In addition, pointer assignment is denoted by =>. Comments are denoted by the ! symbol:

variable = expression ! assignment

pointer => target ! pointer assignment

Similar to Fortran, the type specification is made up of a type, a list of attributes for the declared variables, and the variable list. F provides the same types as Fortran, except that double precision floating point variables must be declared as real with a kind with a kind parameter:

! type [,attribute list] :: entity declaration list

real :: x, y ! declaring variables of type real x,y without an attribute list

integer (kind = long), dimension (100) :: x ! declaring variable of type big integer array with the identifier x

character (len = 100) :: student_name ! declaring a character type variable with len 100

F does not have intrinsic support for object-oriented programming, but it does allow for records:

type, public :: City

character (len = 100) :: name

character (len = 50) :: state

end type City

Variable declarations are followed by an attribute list. The attributes allowed are parameter, public, private, allocatable, dimension, intent, optional, pointer, save and target. The attribute list is followed by ::, which is part of the syntax. F also allows for optional initialization in the list of objects. All items in a list will have the same attributes in a given type declaration statement. In addition, declarations are attribute oriented instead of entity oriented.

F supports 3 statements for control flow: if, a basic conditional, case, a switch statement, and do, a conditional while loop. The return, stop, cycle, and exit statements from Fortran may be used to break control flow.

real :: x

do i = 100

x = x+i

print*,i

cycle

end do

max : do

if (x > y) then

exit max

end if

x = y

end do max

stop

if (x < y) then

x = x + y

else if ( x > y) then

x = y - x

end if

select case (maximum):

case (0)

x = 0

case (1)

x = 1

case (5)

x = 5

case default

x = 10

end select

F places a heavy emphasis on modular programming.

program main

! Insert code here

end program main

Placing procedures outside of a module is prohibited. F supports most of the functions and subroutines found in the Fortran 95 standard library. All functions in F are external by default and require a result clause that returns the value of a function. F supports recursion.

All of the intrinsic procedures found in Fortran 95 may be used in F, with the exceptions of achar, iachar, lge, lgt, lle, llt, transfer, dble, dim, dprod, and mod.

{{Reflist}}

• Walter S. Brainerd, Charles H. Goldberg, and Jeanne C. Adams: "Programmer's Guide to F", Unicomp, 1996.
• {{cite book|url=https://link.springer.com/book/10.1007/978-1-4471-0989-1 |first=Wihelm |last=Gehrke |title=The F Language Guide |publisher=Springer |isbn=978-3-540-76165-5 |date=1997-05-30}}
• Robin A. Vowels: "Algorithms and Data Structures in F and Fortran", Unicomp.
• Loren Meissner: "Essential Fortran 90 & 95", Unicomp, 1997.

• [http://www.fortran.com/F/index.html F Programming Language Homepage] {{Webarchive|url=https://web.archive.org/web/20150109130310/http://www.fortran.com/F/index.html |date=2015-01-09 }}
• [http://www.g95.org/ g95 compiler] {{Webarchive|url=https://web.archive.org/web/20130605121255/http://g95.org/ |date=2013-06-05 }}

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Category:Fortran programming language family

Category:Programming languages