VMS Help FORTRAN, Statements, READ, Indexed, Formatted  *Conan The Librarian (sorry for the slow response - running on an old VAX)

  Formatted Indexed READ statement format:

    READ(extu,fmt,keyspec[,keyid][,err][,iostat])[iolist]

  Reads from a specified external unit.  Translates the data from
  character to binary format as specified by "fmt".