Path: utzoo!attcan!uunet!munnari.oz.au!mel.dit.csiro.au!dmp.csiro.au!sfy
From: sfy@dmp.csiro.au (Shane Youl)
Newsgroups: comp.lang.fortran
Subject: Proper interpretation of blank control in Fortran 77
Message-ID: <1990Oct23.013848.16071@dmp.csiro.au>
Date: 23 Oct 90 01:38:48 GMT
Organization: CSIRO Division of Mineral Products, Melbourne, AUSTRALIA
Lines: 51

Can someone provide the *CORRECT* interpretation for the BZ format specifier.

The Sun Fortran manual says

"BZ - if BZ precedes a specification, a non-leading blank in the input data
      is considered zero."

The VMS Fortran manual says

"The BZ descriptor causes the processor to treat all the embedded and trailing
 blanks it encounters within a numeric input field as zeros."

In neither of the above cases is the behaviour flagged as an extension nor
a modification of the standard.

The following code illustrates the problem under Sun OS and Sun's f77 -

sfy_68% cat bz.f
      character CARD*8
      real      A, B
c                  12345678
      data CARD / "       1" /
c
      read ( CARD, 1000 ) A,B
      write ( *, 2000 ) A,B
      read ( CARD, 1001 ) A,B
      write ( *, 2000 ) A,B
      stop
 1000 format ( bz,f1.0,f7.0 )
 1001 format ( bz,f2.0,f6.0 )
 2000 format ( 2f8.4 )
      end
sfy_69% f77 bz.f
bz.f:
 MAIN:
sfy_70% a.out
  0.NaN0  1.0000
  0.0000  1.0000
sfy_71%

Under VMS, the two output lines are identical.

ADVthanksANCE
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