[potbelly83]

Doesn't fortran also support the ability to define arrays with arbitrary bounds i.e. (-4, 5) which is quite difficult todo in other languages

[pklausler]

Yes, but pitfalls were added to the feature in Fortran '90 and it should now be generally avoided.

[TheRealKing]

I strongly disagree. Arbitrary bounds are tremendously helpful in dealing with arrays whose starting point must be offset.

[pklausler]

I didn't say that they were not helpful; I said they have dangerous pitfalls. Also, they're not perfectly portable. My testing shows that only two compilers get lower bounds right in all the tricky cases that I know of.