Generic programming in Fortran with Forpedo

Abstract

Generic programming is a paradigm in which a single piece of code can be used with multiple data types. For example, code for a linked list could be used to create lists of integers, reals, or even strings. The same source code is used to define each list; the compiler produces different instances of the code, substituting concrete data types (e.g., integer, real) as appropriate to generate a list capable of storing the required data. Without generic programming, a programmer would typically need to make virtually identical copies of the linked list source code for each data type used.