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From: mcdonald@uxe.cso.uiuc.edu
Newsgroups: comp.lang.fortran
Subject: Re: FORTRAN horrors
Message-ID: <50500043@uxe.cso.uiuc.edu>
Date: 1 Apr 88 16:13:00 GMT
References: <502@amethyst.UUCP>
Lines: 27
Nf-ID: #R:amethyst.UUCP:502:uxe.cso.uiuc.edu:50500043:000:1044
Nf-From: uxe.cso.uiuc.edu!mcdonald    Apr  1 10:13:00 1988


>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...

Fortran 77 DOES have one VERY serious problem with strings: it
is impossible to initialize them with non-printing characters. You can,
of course, kludge it by installing things in after initialization:


        character*3 escseq
        data  escseq/' [C'/

...     
         escseq(1:1) = char(27)


Having to do this is just plain stupid: character constants SHOULD have
been treated somewhat like C does, with escape sequences: /027, although
maybe with the requirement that the escapes have a fixed length, or
be terminated by another /. This is fixed in Fortran 88.

Doug McDonald .... Now a satisfied C programmer, except for (Ugh!)
multidimensional arrays.