User Notes on FORTRAN Programming, chapter 1-2 (Comparison of FORTRAN and C), says:
Fortran 90 supports useful features of C (column independent code, pointers, dynamic memory allocation, etc) and C++ (operator overloading, primitive objects).
What does the term "column independent code" mean?
In Fortran 77 lines were divided into sections by columns and each part of your code had to go into a specific section. Specifically for non-comment lines , the first 5 columns would either contain that line's label or be blank if the line had no label. Column 6 would contain an arbitrary non-space character if the line was a continuation of a previous line or be left blank otherwise. And columns 7 through 72 would contain the actual statement to be executed on that line. Comment lines would contain a "c" in the first column and the rest of the line would not matter.
In Fortran 90 and C (and most other languages) the columns don't matter. You can write any part of your code at any column you please. That's almost certainly what's meant as "column independent code" in the post you cited.
This concept is more commonly known as free-form code.
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