INDUSTRY

Developers who seek very clean and portable Fortran code in a Windows environment, can now use the Numerical Algorithm Group's (NAG) NAGWare f95 Compiler for Windows (version 4.2). Arguably the world's most standards compliant compiler, the NAGWare f95 Compiler has many innovations for error detection and supports the Fortran 95 language in its entirety, High Performance Fortran, and legacy Fortran 77 code, and Fortran 2003 standards for allocatable components and for IEEE Floating Point Exception Handling. Many common extensions to Fortran 77 are allowed to provide support for legacy code. For example, the f95 Compiler allows processing of code containing tab format input, byte-sized declarations (e.g. INTEGER*2) and DOUBLE COMPLEX. The NAGWare f95 Compiler includes optional run-time checking of array bounds, pointer association and procedure arguments. Extensive error messages are given by the compiler, both those required by the ISO standard and additional compile and run-time information. The messages are informative rather than cryptic and usually contain context information to assist in identifying and rectifying problems. For this reason the compiler is particularly suited to teaching and for programmers wishing to update their skills to the new language. Built-in modules provide an interface to a large number of Posix system calls, e.g. GETARG, SYSTEM, and many others. To achieve portability, the NAGWare f95 Compiler uses C as its intermediate language - automatically invoking the host compiler to produce object code. Automatic garbage collection is available as an option. This prevents memory leaks by de-allocating memory that can no longer be accessed by the program. In addition to the Users' Manual, a maintenance service is available for the compiler giving access to bug fixes and new releases.