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From: ok@goanna.cs.rmit.oz.au (Richard A. O'Keefe)
Newsgroups: comp.lang.fortran
Subject: Re: Equivalencing Characters Laid to Rest
Message-ID: <4678@goanna.cs.rmit.oz.au>
Date: 31 Jan 91 07:53:28 GMT
References: <11514@helios.TAMU.EDU>
Organization: Comp Sci, RMIT, Melbourne, Australia
Lines: 27

In article <11514@helios.TAMU.EDU>, mkh6317@summa.tamu.edu (HOWARD, MATTHEW KENDALL) writes:
> I'd like to collectively thank those individuals who took the
> time to kindly explain why equivalencing a character variable 
> to a numeric variable violates the standard.
 
> In short, portability.

I'd just like to add an anecdote.  The one time I had to do some paid work
in Fortran it involved porting a program
	*from* a FIVE character per "word" machine (BCD code, I think)
	*to* a FOUR character per "word" machine (ASCII)
	*through* a SIX character per "word" machine (EBCDIC)
One rather nasty point was that not all bit-patterns were valid integers
on the six-char-per-word machine, so that
	INTEGER FRED
	DATA FRED/'ABCDE'/
	FRED = FRED+0
could blow up.  Precisely one thing saved me:  the 6 char per word machine
was a Burroughs B6700 and the compiler had a directive "$CHARS = n" which
told the compiler and the formatted I/O library to pretend that words held
only n bytes.

To this day I have no real hope that I got that conversion right.

-- 
The Marxists have merely _interpreted_ Marxism in various ways;
the point, however, is to _change_ it.		-- R. Hochhuth.