# References to Generic Procedures

Generic procedures are procedures with different specific names that can be accessed under one generic (common) name. In FORTRAN 77, generic procedures were limited to intrinsic procedures. In the current Fortran standard, you can use generic interface blocks to specify generic properties for intrinsic and user-defined procedures.

If you refer to a procedure by using its generic name, the selection of the specific routine is based on the number of arguments and the type and kind parameters, and rank of each argument.

All procedures given the same generic name must be subroutines, or all must be functions. Any two must differ enough so that any invocation of the procedure is unambiguous.

The following sections describe references to generic intrinsic functions and show an example of using intrinsic function names.

## See Also

Unambiguous Generic Procedure References
Intrinsic procedures
Resolving Procedure References
Defining Generic Names for Procedures for details on user-defined generic procedures