[J3] Leading zeroes

[Steve Lionel]

I just received this from a long-time user I am familiar with. 
Unfortunately I don't see a way to incorporate his request without 
radical new syntax (F5.2.5 ?) or breaking existing code. (I also 
referenced 18-268.)

Steve

Coordinating w/others has never been my strong suit, so watching 
something this complex coalesce simply seems like magic to me…  Perhaps 
especially so because Fortran has been around for over 60 years, and 
adding new capabilities while still honoring the original syntax /is/ 
magic (as some might think it impossible!).

I do see a lot on the table, so I suspect it will get tough when it 
comes time to nail it down and /commit/ – as you’ve said before, 
processor “vendors” cannot adopt everything at once so picking the 
right-sized feature set for the next standard is a balancing act – add 
too much and compilers will lag – too little and Fortran will suffer.  
In short, Godspeed!

Re *J3/18-120r3*,  a small suggestion. /Just now/ I was trying to 
zero-pad a floating point number (with +/- sign), but I had to do 
“string gymnastics” with 4-5 lines of code to make it happen.  It’s not 
much burden, and my use case is likely limited, but while your team 
considers this “leading zero” issue in 18-120, perhaps there is a 
generalization of the proposed format change that includes (real number) 
zero-padding, similar to integer such as “I4.4”.  In my case, I was in 
need of 5 characters w/sign and leading zeros (e.g. “+01.14”, “-10.33”, 
“-00.03”, “+00.94”), so I had to use “SP,F0.2” and then adjust the 
resulting string.

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