I’m currently learning FORTRAN (I am familiar with MatLab) and I am very confused about the point of subroutines. Why would anyone use them as opposed to functions. Also, how is it that they can return values when called in the main programs? For example:
PROGRAM SUBDEM
REAL A,B,C,SUM,SUMSQ
CALL INPUT( + A,B,C)
CALL CALC(A,B,C,SUM,SUMSQ)
CALL OUTPUT(SUM,SUMSQ)
END
SUBROUTINE INPUT(X, Y, Z)
REAL X,Y,Z
PRINT *,'ENTER THREE NUMBERS => '
READ *,X,Y,Z
RETURN
END
SUBROUTINE CALC(A,B,C, SUM,SUMSQ)
REAL A,B,C,SUM,SUMSQ
SUM = A + B + C
SUMSQ = SUM **2
RETURN
END
SUBROUTINE OUTPUT(SUM,SUMSQ)
REAL SUM, SUMSQ
PRINT *,'The sum of the numbers you entered are: ',SUM
PRINT *,'And the square of the sum is:',SUMSQ
RETURN
END
My question is essentially, how do I know what each subroutine is returning?
Thank you.
2
In Fortran, a subroutine “returns” everything you pass to it. You can think of it almost like a C Macro. In this:
SUBROUTINE CALC(A,B,C, SUM,SUMSQ)
The subroutine “returns” A, B, C, SUM, and SUMSQ. (Really, it just modifies the values passed to it in-place.)
In contrast, FUNCTION works like a C function, creating locals and returning a single value, which is what people used to more modern languages typically expect.
1
As a rough guide, functions are generally used to enclose a small segment of code that has no side-effects. For example, we can write
x = 2*foo(a) + foo(b)/4
if the order of execution is not critical (either because of no side-effects or the side-effects don’t influence the result). If the code segment is large and/or contains many side-effects, it might be better to use a subroutine. A subroutine call is always a separate statement and thus the execution order is always unambiguous.
A subroutine is like a C function with a void return type and with some arguments passed by reference (by default all, actually). Ignoring good style and code safety, it is in principle possible to use only functions or only subroutines when writing modern Fortran.
1