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From: tholen@uhccux.uhcc.Hawaii.Edu (David Tholen)
Newsgroups: comp.lang.fortran
Subject: Re: {upper|lower}case (Re: intrinsic)
Message-ID: <10713@uhccux.uhcc.Hawaii.Edu>
Date: 19 Dec 90 10:03:20 GMT
Distribution: comp
Organization: University of Hawaii
Lines: 18

> If you did have an intrinsic to do case conversion, you could count on it not 
> being part of the ANSI/ISO Fortran77 standard - because lowercase letters
> are not part of the standard character set!  (Of course, if you were
> using C, you could use tolower(), but let's not start up THAT war again...)
 
Although it is true that only the 26 uppercase letters are in the so-called
FORTRAN character set, it is also true that comment lines "may contain any
character capable of representation in the processor in columns 2 through
72", and that character strings (constants and variables) "may consist of
any characters capable of representation in the processor".  Thus it is
perfectly standard to have an intrinsic function that operates on strings
that contain lowercase letters, assuming that lowercase letters can be
represented by the processor.  In fact, the LEN intrinsic function can
operate on strings containing lowercase letters, so there is no reason why
an uppercasing or lowercasing function could not be part of the ANSI standard.
I've written both uppercasing and lowercasing functions for my own library,
so I don't need to resort to C's tolower; it's easily accomplished in
standard conforming FORTRAN, though an intrinsic should be faster.