(j3.2006) posting to comp.lang.fortran

[Robert Corbett]

On 02/28/12 05:20, Bill Long wrote:
>
>
> On 2/27/12 6:58 PM, Robert Corbett wrote:
>> On 02/27/12 01:19, Tobias Burnus wrote:
>>> Dear all,
>>>
>>> at comp.lang.fortran, Bob Corbett queried what the different compilers
>>> output
>>> for the following program - and the replies showed that the results
>>> vary a lot. Cf.
>>> http://groups.google.com/group/comp.lang.fortran/browse_thread/thread/694050b1806da367 
>>>
>>>
>>>
>>> (I assume that he intended to post it here or write an IR.)
>>>
>> No, I did not intend to post the program to this mailing
>> list. I did not intend to write an interpretation request.
>> The answers to interpretation requests 000024 and 000027
>> against the Fortran 95 standard answered any questions I
>> might have had about what the output of the program should
>> be.
>>
>> I have known for about a decade that the implementation I
>> help support does not implement nonadvancing i/o as
>> required by interpretations 000024 and 000027. I recently
>> started working on fixes for our implementation. After
>> about a day, I realized that the fixes would require much
>> more work than I had originally thought. I was curious how
>> other implementations handled some of the hard cases, which
>> resulted in my posting on comp.lang.fortran.
>
> Which at least some of us would have never seen since we quit reading 
> comp.lang.fortran years ago when the signal/noise ratio dropped too far.

Because there were no standards-related issues in my posting to
comp.lang.fortran, I did not think copying my posting to this
e-mail list would be appropriate.

There was a posting to comp.lang.fortran by Ian Harvey that might
be of interest here.  He gave the example of the statement

       READ (unit) .op. 666, X

The operator .op. has both unary and binary forms.  The unary form
returns a pointer to a target variable, which the binary form
returns a character string of type default character that has the
form of a format.  He asked if "(unit) .op. 666" should be treated
as a format or as an i/o control list followed by a variable.

Bob Corbett