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From: buckland@cheddar.ucs.ubc.ca (Tony Buckland)
Newsgroups: comp.lang.fortran
Subject: Re: problem with "pe" format
Message-ID: <8159@ubc-cs.UUCP>
Date: 7 Jun 90 17:49:37 GMT
References: <90155.122858GL4@psuvm.psu.edu> <90158.091706GL4@psuvm.psu.edu>
Sender: news@cs.ubc.ca
Reply-To: buckland@cheddar.ucs.ubc.ca (Tony Buckland)
Organization: UBC Computing Centre, Vancouver, B.C., Canada
Lines: 17

In article <90158.091706GL4@psuvm.psu.edu> GL4@psuvm.psu.edu writes:
>
>Thanks to everyone who e-mailed me about the problem I was having with the
>"p" format specifier. As everyone noted, this really *is* standard (although
>very strange) FORTRAN behavior.
>
>I'd be curious to know if anyone can think of a sitution where you'd actually
>*want* the magnitude of the output to be changed like that.

 One use is in scaled currency applications, where you have internal
 cents or centicents and want to print dollars or cents without
 the bother of dividing everything by a hundred first.  I could
 see extending this to scientific calculations where nanometers
 are printed as Angstrom units, etc.  Returning to the currency case,
 you can see the advantage of being able to print an entire
 financial report with hundreds of variables, scaling everything
 with just one itty-bitty "P" at the beginning of the FORMAT.