Path: utzoo!attcan!utgpu!jarvis.csri.toronto.edu!cs.utexas.edu!swrinde!zaphod.mps.ohio-state.edu!rpi!ccnysci!phri!cmcl2!lanl!lambda!jlg
From: jlg@lambda.UUCP (Jim Giles)
Newsgroups: comp.lang.fortran
Subject: Re: EQUIVALENCE, COMPUTED GO TO in FORTRAN 88?
Message-ID: <14169@lambda.UUCP>
Date: 12 Dec 89 01:03:07 GMT
References: <7255@ficc.uu.net>
Lines: 15

From article <7255@ficc.uu.net>, by peter@ficc.uu.net (Peter da Silva):
> [...] 
> Heaven forbid I should defend one of the weirder aspects of FORTRAN, but this
> is now actually a useful feature. In a hosted implementation on a windowing
> system, PAUSE could reasonably be expected to put up a requestor or dialog
> box and wait for a mouse click... something that a simple PRINT+READ can't do.

But in this case you would simply replace the PAUSE with a
CALL REQ_BOX("message") instead of a PRINT+READ.  The point is
that PAUSE has no semantics which cannot be handled more flexibly
and more explicitly by other means already in the language.

PAUSE only serves a useful purpose on strict batch systems with
no interactive I/O (not even to the operator's console).  It's
been a long time since most of us have even seen one of those!