Path: utzoo!utgpu!news-server.csri.toronto.edu!clyde.concordia.ca!uunet!cs.dal.ca!silvert
From: silvert@cs.dal.ca (Bill Silvert)
Newsgroups: comp.lang.fortran
Subject: Re: RE : MSFORTRAN   - bugs !!!!
Summary: CHARACTER*(*)
Message-ID: <1990Apr13.205055.23252@cs.dal.ca>
Date: 13 Apr 90 20:50:55 GMT
References: <1990Apr11.144430.26803@sun.soe.clarkson.edu> <MAINE.90Apr11111830@altair.dfrf.nasa.gov>
Sender: silvert@cs.dal.ca.UUCP (Bill Silvert)
Reply-To: bill@biomel.UUCP
Organization: Habitat Ecology Div., Bedford Inst. of Oceanography
Lines: 34

In article <MAINE.90Apr11111830@altair.dfrf.nasa.gov> maine@elxsi.dfrf.nasa.gov (Richard Maine) writes:
>On 11 Apr 90 14:44:30 GMT, pdy@sun.soe.clarkson.edu (P. D. Yapa) said:
>Pooji> I had trouble passing a string variable though
>Pooji> subroutine arguments. It never works on MSFORT
>Pooji> c --- main prog
>Pooji>         character *8 fnm
>Pooji>         call opnfil('ross.fnm')
>Pooji> ---------
>Pooji>        subroutine opnfil(fnm)
>Pooji>        character *8 fnm
	[... much deleted ...]
>characters and it makes no sense to have fewer, it is better to write
>the code as
>       -----
>       subroutine opnfil(fnm)
>       character fnm*(*)
>       ---

Exactly.  Although I have never used the fixed-length format in the
original example, I have thousands of lines of code that do extensive
string passing, and no Fortran-77 compiler has ever choked on a
declaration of the form of:

	SUBROUTINE SUB(STRING)
	CHARACTER*(*) STRING

and I can see no need to specify fixed-length strings (an exception that
I have used successfully is a string of length one).

-- 
William Silvert, Habitat Ecology Division, Bedford Inst. of Oceanography
P. O. Box 1006, Dartmouth, Nova Scotia, CANADA B2Y 4A2.  Tel. (902)426-1577
UUCP=..!{uunet|watmath}!dalcs!biomel!bill
BITNET=bill%biomel%dalcs@dalac	InterNet=bill%biomel@cs.dal.ca