6.2.1 STRUCTURE and RECORD

Record structures are a pre-Fortran-90 vendor extension to create user-defined aggregate data types. GNU Fortran does not support record structures, only Fortran 90's “derived types”, which have a different syntax.

In many cases, record structures can easily be converted to derived types. To convert, replace STRUCTURE /structure-name/ by TYPE type-name. Additionally, replace RECORD /structure-name/ by TYPE(type-name). Finally, in the component access, replace the period (.) by the percent sign (%).

Here is an example of code using the non portable record structure syntax:

! Declaring a structure named ``item'' and containing three fields:
! an integer ID, an description string and a floating-point price.
STRUCTURE /item/
  INTEGER id
  CHARACTER(LEN=200) description
  REAL price
END STRUCTURE

! Define two variables, an single record of type ``item''
! named ``pear'', and an array of items named ``store_catalog''
RECORD /item/ pear, store_catalog(100)

! We can directly access the fields of both variables
pear.id = 92316
pear.description = "juicy D'Anjou pear"
pear.price = 0.15
store_catalog(7).id = 7831
store_catalog(7).description = "milk bottle"
store_catalog(7).price = 1.2

! We can also manipulate the whole structure
store_catalog(12) = pear
print *, store_catalog(12)

This code can easily be rewritten in the Fortran 90 syntax as following:

! ``STRUCTURE /name/ ... END STRUCTURE'' becomes
! ``TYPE name ... END TYPE''
TYPE item
  INTEGER id
  CHARACTER(LEN=200) description
  REAL price
END TYPE

! ``RECORD /name/ variable'' becomes ``TYPE(name) variable''
TYPE(item) pear, store_catalog(100)

! Instead of using a dot (.) to access fields of a record, the
! standard syntax uses a percent sign (%)
pear%id = 92316
pear%description = "juicy D'Anjou pear"
pear%price = 0.15
store_catalog(7)%id = 7831
store_catalog(7)%description = "milk bottle"
store_catalog(7)%price = 1.2

! Assignments of a whole variable do not change
store_catalog(12) = pear
print *, store_catalog(12)