Fortran 90 is the current international Fortran standard. MPI-2 Fortran bindings are Fortran 90 bindings that in most cases are ``Fortran 77 friendly.'' That is, with few exceptions (e.g., KIND-parameterized types, and the mpi module, both of which can be avoided) Fortran 77 compilers should be able to compile MPI programs.
[] Rationale.
Fortran 90 contains numerous features designed to make it a more
``modern'' language than Fortran 77. It seems natural that MPI
should be able to take advantage of these new features with a set of
bindings tailored to Fortran 90. MPI does not (yet)
use many of these features
because of a number of technical difficulties.
( End of rationale.)
MPI defines two levels of Fortran support, described in
Sections Basic Fortran Support
and Extended Fortran Support
. A third level of
Fortran support is envisioned, but is deferred to future
standardization efforts. In the rest of this section, ``Fortran''
shall refer to Fortran 90 (or its successor) unless qualified.