F77's Assumed-Size Arrays

An assumed-size array may only appear as a dummy argument of a procedure; in its declaration, all the extents except the last one must be given explicitly, and the last one is specified by .

For example, the calling program declares

real, dimension(50) :: Z
call test(Z)

and the subroutine header is

subroutine test(Z)
real, dimension(*) :: Z

The idea in F77 was that Z was allocated in the calling program; the only thing the subroutine needs to know is where the array Z starts; all other elements are found in subsequent memory locations.