What are the POSIX Fortran Bindings?
The Posix 1003.9-1992 Fortran bindings are a standardized set of library calls for making various low level requests of the operating system. There are dozens of calls available – documented on many systems in the intro_pxf man pages. Three of the most popular calls are PXFGETENV (get environment variables) and PXFGETARG (get command line arguments) calls, and the IPXFARGC (get argument count) function. Some people dislike the Posix bindings because they are not ‘Fortran-90-like’. The calls were standardized in the early 1990s when Fortran-77 was still prevalent. The committee therefore took the conservative approach that, with the exception of long external names, all calls had to be usable in a Fortran-77 environment. For example, consider the case where a program needs to know the size of a given file. The PXFSTAT routine is used. However, first PXFSTRUCTCREATE must be called to create an appropriate data structure for return values. A handle is passed back to the user for reference
