A reference counting implementation in Fortran 95/2003

Abstract

This paper outlines a reference counting programming pattern for derived types in Fortran 95/2003. Modern object oriented languages like Java [1, 3] and Python [2, 6] use reference counting to free the programmer from the concern of object allocation and deallocation, thus making possible memory leaks almost obsolete. The reference counting pattern outlined here is being used with the PyF95++ pre-processor [5] and the accompanying Standard Template Library. All the containers in that project are reference counted containers and employ this pattern. The result of this pattern is something akin to an auto ptr template class in C++ [4].