Path: utzoo!utgpu!water!watmath!clyde!att-cb!att-ih!pacbell!ames!pasteur!ucbvax!ucsfcgl!cgl.ucsf.edu!seibel
From: seibel@cgl.ucsf.edu (George Seibel%Kollman)
Newsgroups: comp.lang.fortran
Subject: Re: FORTRAN horrors
Message-ID: <10772@cgl.ucsf.EDU>
Date: 31 Mar 88 09:53:10 GMT
References: <499@amethyst.UUCP>
Sender: daemon@cgl.ucsf.edu
Reply-To: seibel@socrates.ucsf.edu.UUCP (George Seibel)
Organization: UCSF Computer Graphics Lab
Lines: 24

In article <499@amethyst.UUCP> chris@spock.ame.arizona.edu (Chris Ott) writes:
>
>lamaster@ames.arpa (Hugh LaMaster) writes:
>
>     Once you get out of the computational domain, however, Fortran just
>doesn't cut it. I used to do a lot of work with character strings in Fortran.
>Most compilers I've worked with don't even handle the substring operations
>defined by the Fortran 77 standard. Let's face it: strings were an after
>thought in Fortran and they are inadequate, at best.

Maybe this is a case of "that was then and this is now"...  I do a lot of
string manipulation in fortran, I couldn't live without it.  I've run the
same string manipulating code on Macs and Crays, and a lot of machines
in between, and it worked.  Those compilers you mention that can't handle
substrings are either broken or they aren't Fortran 77.  (Is there a
legal subset-language without substrings?)   I think fortran 77 has gotten
a bad rap on strings;  I've been told on a number of occasions that
Fortran "can't do" string manipulations that I do all the time with 
standard ANSI Fortran 77!  I'm not talking about hideous bit-pushing hacks,
I'm talking portable code.   Now if I could just treat a file as a byte
stream...

George Seibel
UC San Francisco