Fortran 90 allows for a free source format, removing the restrictions FORTRAN 77 placed on the line layout. The main differences include: leading spaces are not significant; line continuation is specified with an ampersand character (&) at the end of a line; and comments can be placed anywhere following an exclamation mark (!). In addition, the relational operators .LT., .LE., .EQ., .NE., .GE. and .GT. can be replaced by <, <=, ==, /=, => and > respectively. Also allowed are multiple statement lines, separated by a ;, for example,

 a = 0; b = a  

Other improvements in syntax include variable names with over 31 characters, ``_'' in names and lower case. Below is a code fragment making use of a number of these features:

  PROGRAM Goodbye_World 
! Give the farewell message 
  WRITE(6, *)'Now I say to the world, goodbye,', &
 'goodbye, goodbye, goodbye' ! Say goodbye already
 END