Section: 5.4 The Fortran-77 API

5.4 The Fortran-77 API

The Fortran-77 library provided early Fortran support for modelers and scientists.

Strengths

Well-documented: The netCDF Fortran-77 Users Guide is complete and up-to-date, and reference documentation is maintained in man-page form.
Comprehensively tested: A large number of tests are run when the netCDF Fortran-77 library is installed from source.
Support by ncgen utility: The ncgen utility, given a CDL file, can generate the Fortran-77 code needed to create the file. This is currently a significant advantage, if you want to avoid writing the boilerplate code to create files with lots of variables and attributes. (However, the generated ncgen code is awkward for record variables of type character.)

Other Characteristics

Implemented as a thin layer on top of the C netCDF-3 library.
Order of subscripts in CDL: CDL uses row-major order for matrices (last dimension varies fastest), but Fortran uses column-major order (first dimension varies fastest), which can be confusing.
Memory handling: You have to provide memory space for any netCDF data values and attribute values you read.
Error handling: The status of every function call must be checked, which detracts from code clarity.

Examples

Annotated examples of complete Fortran77 netCDF programs are available from the program examples page.