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From: ark@alice.UUCP
Newsgroups: comp.lang.fortran
Subject: Re: Problem with substrings
Message-ID: <6956@alice.UUCP>
Date: Fri, 5-Jun-87 17:53:54 EDT
Article-I.D.: alice.6956
Posted: Fri Jun  5 17:53:54 1987
Date-Received: Sat, 6-Jun-87 20:30:16 EDT
References: <286@nikhefh.UUCP> <844@westpt.usma.edu>
Organization: AT&T Bell Laboratories, Liberty Corner NJ
Lines: 18

In article <844@westpt.usma.edu>, bill@westpt.UUCP writes:
 [description of a statement that does different things on different machines]
> I can't wait to see which is right and which is wrong.
> Aren't standards wonderful.  :-)

When you define a language standard, you can do one of several
things.  The particular thing Fortran 77 does is sometimes described
by the phrase "permissive on implementations, restrictive on users."

In English, this means that the Fortran 77 standard defines what is
a valid Fortran 77 program, and then goes on to say that a valid
implementation is one that does the right thing when given a
valid program as input.

That means that the standard says nothing at all about what the
implementation should do when given an invalid program.  If you
want your program to work on a variety of implementations, it's
up to you to ensure it is valid.