Path: utzoo!mnetor!uunet!seismo!sundc!pitstop!texsun!texsun.central-relay.sun.com!convex!authorplaceholder
From: hutchson@convex.UUCP
Newsgroups: comp.lang.fortran
Subject: Re: I would like to have an argumen
Message-ID: <68000011@convex>
Date: 9 Mar 88 21:57:00 GMT
References: <720@cresswell.quintus.UUCP>
Lines: 33
Nf-ID: #R:cresswell.quintus.UUCP:-72000:convex:68000011:000:1926
Nf-From: convex.UUCP!hutchson    Mar  9 15:57:00 1988


GCOS has a similar bifurcation between (global) file names and (local) file
descriptors.  The "file descriptors" are set up by the environment--the usual
jcl or shell commands.
     We (I was supporting GCOS Fortran-77 at the time) had endless complaints
from users about what was possible/difficult/confusing about file access via
the OPEN statement, until we adopted a scheme essentially identical to the one
suggested:
   1)  open status='scratch' generated (or accessed) a temporary file in the
     local name space:  it usually vanished at job close but could be left
     around via close status='keep' (This last, of course, is an extention
     to the ANSI standard.
   2)  open name='ambiguous name' looked first in the local name space then
     in the global name space for the file; if not found, it created it in
     the global name space.
   3)  open name='global name'  (The local name space was a subset of the
     global name space) looked in the global name space; if not found, it
     created it.
This made everyone happy:  it is general enough that plain-vanilla use of
     open works as on other systems, powerful enough to do anything you could
     think of doing with an OPEN statement, easy to explain.

I work on unix now, and I miss temporary files.  Yes, I know about mktemp:
it doesn't work at all well, and I wrote a better one for my own uses.  But
there is no such thing on unix as a temporary file that steals SWIFTLY and
silently away as soon as the job finishes executing.  This is not a feature;
this is a severe limitation!  It is not possible to simulate temporary files
on unix without great effort; it is a pain even to pretend to simulate it.

"And there was evening and morning, another day.  And abortive processes
generated four more files in /tmp, and the system manager saw that it was not
good, for verily the partition overflowed and the system rested on the seventh
day."