Path: utzoo!mnetor!uunet!lll-winken!lll-lcc!lll-tis!mordor!sri-spam!sri-unix!quintus!ok
From: ok@quintus.UUCP (Richard A. O'Keefe)
Newsgroups: comp.lang.fortran
Subject: Re: I would like to have an argument, please! (Re: F8X response (long))
Message-ID: <720@cresswell.quintus.UUCP>
Date: 2 Mar 88 07:09:00 GMT
References: <705@elxsi.UUCP> <44400017@hcx2> <2337@s.cc.purdue.edu> <2380@s.cc.purdue.edu>
Organization: Quintus Computer Systems, Mountain View, CA
Lines: 33

In article <2380@s.cc.purdue.edu>, ags@s.cc.purdue.edu (Dave Seaman) writes:
> You are confusing the original context of the discussion with the original
Nope, just sticking to the topic.
> 	1.  It IS possible to access files "dynamically" in FTN200 under
> 	    VSOS, but only by resorting to nonstandard system calls.
It's not clear what you mean by "nonstandard".
Since system calls are outside the scope of the Fortran standard,
I took this to mean that there was thought to be some extra-hairy
about the system calls qua system calls, such as being undocumented.
If that was not the intention "system calls" would have sufficed.
The system calls you need under CMS are perfectly ordinary CMS system calls.

> 	2.  It would be preferable to provide for dynamic file access 
> 	    within standard FORTRAN, but FTN200 is not the only environment
> 	    that has this problem.  It is shared, for example, by FORTVS2
> 	    under CMS.
It is surely of interest that the problem is not CMS, but the fact that
FORTVS2 is basically an MVS program, and its run-time library is basically
an MVS run-time library, which CMS more-or-less emulates.  I repeat that
someone could provide a Fortran compiler for UNIX which didn't support
UNIX file names, but we'd hardly take *that* to be evidence that dynamic
file access should not be part of standard Fortran, and an MVS Fortran
compiler running under CMS doesn't provide any better evidence.

If you want to argue that FORTVS2 + MVS is evidence for this position,
that's another argument!

The Fortran standard *does* provide for dynamic file access, the only
trouble is that the implementation gets to define what this means.
dpANS C has all the usual C stuff for opening files, and #include
directives, and all.  In an MVS C compiler, these names would be ddnames
(or #include names would be members of libraries).  Again, it looks like
dynamic file access, but the implementation gets to define what that
means.