Other Characters

  Most computers have a character set which includes many other printable characters, for example lower-case letters, square brackets, ampersands and per-cent signs. Any printable characters supported by the machine may be used in comment lines and within character constants.

The Fortran character set does not include any carriage-control characters such as tab, carriage-return, or form-feed, but formatted WRITE statements can be used to produce paginated and tabulated output files.

Fortran programs can process as data any characters supported by the local hardware. The Fortran Standard is not based on the use of any particular character code but it requires its character comparison functions to use the collating sequence of the American Standard Code for Information Interchange (ASCII). Further details are given in section 7.6.