7. I/O

7.1 Files

Paradoxically, Fortran, the scientific language par excellence, has a fine array of tools for manipulating files, further enhanced by the recent standard.

There are two types of files, depending on the form of their content:

• text files, whose records (or components) exclusively contain strings of characters (text-type files in Pascal; offered by the predefined text_io package in Ada; created under the control of an editing format in Fortran, and in stream mode in PL /1);

• binary files, whose records are sequences of arbitrary values (or formatless files).

Two methods of accessing records are available in Fortran:

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