HP Fortran Programmer's Reference (September 2007)

I/O formatting
Format specification
Chapter 9238
Format specification
A format specification consists of a list of edit descriptors that define the format of data to be
read with a READ statement, or written with a WRITE or PRINT statement. A format
specification can appear either in a FORMAT statement or in a character expression in a data
transfer statement.
The syntax of a format specification is:
[ descriptor1 [, descriptor2 ...]]
where:
descriptor is an edit descriptor that is used to convert data between its internal
(binary) format and an external (character) format. Edit descriptors are
described in detail in the following section.
Note that format specifications are not used in list-directed and namelist-directed I/O.