(j3.2006) synchronizing I/O

[Robert Corbett]

Bill Long wrote:
> We discussed this topic in plenary this morning.   A new approach 
> emerged that transfers the work from the standard to the vendor, more or 
> less.

It sounds to me as if the new approach moves the work of specifying
what happens to the vendor, which transfers the work to the user.

> The approach is to keep stdout and stderr as separate "files" in 
> each image from Fortran's point of view.  And then include a Note that 
> the processor might be expected to interleave the records of all these 
> files onto the user's terminal in some reasonable way.  Van pointed out 
> that this already occurs for the combination of stdout and stderr, both 
> of which are (normally) directed to the terminal with interleaved 
> records.

I asked the committee some time ago what the standard said about
programs that began execution with two units preconnected to the
same file.  I was told that such programs are outside the scope
of the standard and so the behavior is undefined.  Will that be
changed?

> This removes the exceptional nature of these files from the 
> standard (a simplification), but does not mandate the user's 
> expectations.  The DATA subgroup will write a paper to implement this 
> approach.
> 
> Cheers,
> Bill

Bob Corbett