Modern Fortran

6 Reading, writing, and formatting your data

This chapter covers

• Reading from the keyboard and writing to the screen
• Standard input, output, and error streams
• Formatting numbers and text
• Writing data to files on disk

One of the pillars of every useful program is its input and output (I/O). Almost every program reads some input data from the keyboard, file, or network; does some calculation or processing on it; and outputs the result to the screen, a file on disk, or some other device. If the program is designed to be used directly by a human user (rather than being a piece of some intricate pipeline), I/O becomes even more important. Specifically, inputting data to the program should be as easy as possible, with minimum effort for the user. ...