Arrays can have values assigned as a whole without specifying operations on individual array elements, and array sections can be accessed. Also, allocatable arrays that are created dynamically are available in Fortran 90. The following example illustrates valid array operations. Both explicit-shape arrays and deferred shape arrays are valid in a main program. Assumed shape arrays and assumed size arrays are only valid for arrays used as dummy arguments.
Every array has properties of type rank , shape and size .
The extent of an array's dimension is the number of elements in the dimension. The array rank is the number of dimensions in the array, up to a maximum of seven. The shape is the vector representing the extents for all dimensions. The size is the product of the extents. For some types of arrays, all of these properties are determined when the array is declared.