Error handling in Fortran 2003

Although the Fortran programming language is evolving steadily, it still lacks a framework for error handling-- not to be confused with floating point exceptions. Therefore, the commonly used techniques for handling errors did not change much since the early days and do not benefit from the new features of Fortran 2003. After discussing some historical approaches, a Fortran 2003 framework for error handling is presented. This framework also proved to be valuable in the context of unit testing and the design-by-contract (DBC) paradigm.