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From: buckland@cheddar.ucs.ubc.ca (Tony Buckland)
Newsgroups: comp.lang.fortran
Subject: Re: I/O
Message-ID: <1991Jan25.172533.5985@unixg.ubc.ca>
Date: 25 Jan 91 17:25:33 GMT
References: <11498@helios.TAMU.EDU>
Sender: news@unixg.ubc.ca (Usenet News Maintenance)
Organization: Computing Services, University of British Columbia
Lines: 20

In article <11498@helios.TAMU.EDU> mkh6317@rigel.tamu.edu writes:
>Ok, ok. Uncle.  Since I don't have a copy of the "standard" I
>will have to take your word that "equivalencing a character
>variable to a non-character variable" is a violation of the
>standard.    Now tell me why.

 I assume you mean ``why was the standard made that way?"
 Depending on your point of view: (1) to make life miserable
 for everybody who had clever ways of manipulating character
 data in, or as though it were, variables of other types;
 (2) to achieve portability between systems which represent
 either character data or other types of data in different
 ways.  What you are *not* supposed to do, for instance, is
 equivalence a four-character array to a fullword integer
 variable, set it to zero, and then detect digits in your
 input by feeding one character at a time into the right-hand
 byte and seeing if the integer is over 239 (if that seems
 incomprehensible, it's because the example is based on IBM
 370 machines using EBCDIC coding, and proves the wisdom of
 (2)).