The new features of Fortran 2015

Abstract

aim of this paper is to summarize the new features of the Fortran standard that is expected to be published in 2018. It is known informally as Fortran 2015 because the choice of features to include was chosen in 2015. We take as our starting point Fortran 2008 (ISO/IEC 2010). Two official extensions have been published as Technical Specifications. ISO/IEC (2012) specifies further features for interoperability of Fortran with C and ISO/IEC (2015) specifies additional parallel features. WG5 committed itself to include both of these in Fortran 2015. The introduction of a new IEEE standard for floating-point arithmetic (ISO/IEC/IEEE 2011) necessitated changes to the IEEE modules. Beyond these features, WG5 decided to limit changes to the removal of deficiencies and discrepancies, which by definition are all small. For an informal description of Fortran 2008, see Metcalf, Reid and Cohen (2011).