21.13.2.3 Syntactic Conventions

Fortran mode assumes that you follow certain conventions that simplify the task of understanding a Fortran program well enough to indent it properly:

• Two nested ‘do’ loops never share a ‘continue’ statement.
• The same character appears in column 5 of all continuation lines. It is the value of the variable fortran-continuation-char. By default, this character is ‘$’.

If you fail to follow these conventions, the indentation commands may indent some lines unaesthetically. However, a correct Fortran program will retain its meaning when reindented even if the conventions are not followed.