Line continuation of strings in Fortran

Question

I just started using gfortran 4.7.2 in Fedora 17. When I tried to use the following a test code, I am not getting output:

    PROGRAM test_ampersand
    IMPLICIT NONE
    PRINT *, 'I am a new learner of' &
     'fortran'
    END PROGRAM test_ampersand

I was expecting the output as:

I am a new learner of fortran

Answer 1

This should work too:

PRINT *, 'I am a new learner of &
     &fortran'

That is, character literals can be continued across line breaks but each continuation line must have an ampersand in the first non-blank position.