Project Strings: Improving strings support in Fortran

Addition of deferred length variables in Fortran 2003 provides a user with an utility to leave the responsibility of allocating the required space to a variable on the compiler. A deferred length variable is either pointer or allocatable. Compiler during execution allocates space based upon the value to be assigned to a variable.
For eg: If the value to be assigned to a character variable is "spiderman", then the compiler will automatically allocate a space required to store this character sequence of length 9 and a reference to this space will be stored in the variable. Similarly, if a new character sequence, let’s say, "batman"(which is of length 6) is assigned to this same variable then the compiler will allocate a space required to store "batman" and a reference to this space will overwrite the previously stored reference in the variable. Thus, space required by the variable is constant as it is not storing the actual character sequence and is rather storing the reference to the space where the character sequence is actually stored.

Goals of the project:
1). Conceptualize and add new functionalities to strings
2). Designing and implementing list of variable-length strings