Fortran 90 's Object Oriented Facilities

Fortran 90 has some degree of object oriented facilities such as:

• data abstraction -- user-defined types;
• data hiding -- PRIVATE and PUBLIC attributes;
• encapsulation -- Modules and data hiding facilities;
• inheritance and extensibility -- super-types, operator overloading and generic procedures;
• polymorphism -- user can program his / her own polymorphism by generic overloading;
• reusability -- Modules;

FORTRAN 77 had virtually no object oriented features at all, Fortran 90 adds much but by no means all the required functionality. As usual there is a trade off with efficiency. One of the ultimate goals of Fortran 90 is that the code must be efficient.

• Data Abstraction
• Data Hiding
• Encapsulation
• Inheritance and Extensibility
• Polymorphism
• Reusability