Editing Pointer (computer programming) (section)

===Fortran===
[[Fortran|Fortran-90]] introduced a strongly typed pointer capability. Fortran pointers contain more than just a simple memory address. They also encapsulate the lower and upper bounds of array dimensions, strides (for example, to support arbitrary array sections), and other metadata. An ''association operator'', <code>=></code> is used to associate a <code>POINTER</code> to a variable which has a <code>TARGET</code> attribute. The Fortran-90 <code>ALLOCATE</code> statement may also be used to associate a pointer to a block of memory. For example, the following code might be used to define and create a linked list structure:
<syntaxhighlight lang="Fortran">
type real_list_t
  real :: sample_data(100)
  type (real_list_t), pointer :: next => null ()
end type

type (real_list_t), target :: my_real_list
type (real_list_t), pointer :: real_list_temp

real_list_temp => my_real_list
do
  read (1,iostat=ioerr) real_list_temp%sample_data
  if (ioerr /= 0) exit
  allocate (real_list_temp%next)
  real_list_temp => real_list_temp%next
end do
</syntaxhighlight>

Fortran-2003 adds support for procedure pointers. Also, as part of the ''C Interoperability'' feature, Fortran-2003 supports intrinsic functions for converting C-style pointers into Fortran pointers and back.