HP Fortran Programmer's Guide (B3908-90031; September 2011)

Glossary 259
Glossary
A-B
archive library A library of routines that can be
linked to an executable program at link-time. The
names of archive libraries have the .a extension.
See also shared library.
aliasing Referencing a variable by more than one
name. Examples of aliasing include:
• Passing the same variable as two or more
actual arguments.
•Using the EQUIVALENCE statement.
• Referencing an element of an array declared in
common with an out-of-bounds subscript.
• Passing a common variable as an actual
argument.
In general, aliasing inhibits optimization.
alignment The positioning of data within memory.
Except for objects larger than 8 bytes,
HP Fortran 90 aligns data on a byte boundary that is
a multiple of its size. Objects larger than 8 bytes are
aligned on 8-byte boundaries.
automatic variable A variable that is allocated on
the stack. By default, program variables in
HP Fortran 90 are automatic. Two characteristics of
automatic variables are of note:
• They are allocated at each invocation of the
procedure in which they are declared and
deallocated upon return from the procedure.
This means that automatic variables do not
retain their value between invocations.
• They must be explicitly initialized.
See also static variable..
back-end The component of the compiler that
optimizes and generates object code. See also
front-end..
Basic Linear Algebra Subroutine library A
library of de facto standard routines for performing
low-level vector and matrix operations. To access
routines in this library, you must compile with the
-lblas option.
BLAS See Basic Linear Algebra Subroutine
library.
BOZ constant An integer constant that is used as
an initializer in a DATA statement and is formatted
in binary (B), octal (O), or hexadecimal (Z) notation.
buffering, tty See tty buffering.
built-in functions The two HP Fortran 90
extensions, %VAL and %REF. %VAL forces an
argument to be passed by value, and %REF forces it
to be passed by reference.
C-D
cpp See C preprocessor.
C preprocessor A C language utility that removes
or adds statements in a program source text, in
accordance with directives that have been inserted
in the source file. HP Fortran 90 can pass source
files to the C preprocessor (cpp) for preprocessing
and then send the output to the compiler.
column-major order The method of storing
Fortran 90 arrays in memory. Column-major order
requires the columns of a two-dimensional array to
be in contiguous memory locations. For example,