Wow! Thanks for the help everyone. I will look into each of your comments in more detail in the morning, but I'll mention a few things I guess. The first is, the list-directed output was not necesarily my choice as some of the code is also used by my supervisor (and her colleagues) and I had to keep the IO similar. However, for "non-legacy" codes (even though is was upgraded to Fortran90), I can ensure you that I will employ a more portable format.
Also, I am very interested in the Scientific.IO module mentioned and will look into it further along with f2py. Once again, I thank all of you for your replies, I think I even learnt a few things about Fortran here too.... Cheers, t. -- http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list
