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From: hirchert@uxe.cso.uiuc.edu
Newsgroups: comp.lang.fortran
Subject: Re: Any way to fseek() in MS-Fortran un
Message-ID: <50500059@uxe.cso.uiuc.edu>
Date: 17 Jul 88 20:49:00 GMT
References: <472@morgoth.UUCP>
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Nf-ID: #R:morgoth.UUCP:472:uxe.cso.uiuc.edu:50500059:000:1385
Nf-From: uxe.cso.uiuc.edu!hirchert    Jul 17 15:49:00 1988


Various people have asked why FORTRAN 77 doesn't allow list-directed input from
an internal file.  I wasn't a member of X3J3 when FORTRAN 77 was developed, but
I think I can offer an intelligent guess:
1. People would think it strange to allow list-directed input and not list-
   directed output, but list-directed output is distinctly nonportable
   because of the differences in output formats used for list-directed
   output.  (We're not just talking differences in what output looks like;
   we're talking differences in whether a program runs because the internal
   file may not be big enough to hold the generated output.)
2. Even list-directed input isn't as easy as some people think because of the
   difficulty in coping with the fact that list-directed input may or may not
   read additional records, depending on whether or not there were enough
   values on the first record.  If one does enough parsing to determine how
   many values appear on the record, then it isn't that much more work to
   construct a format to read them.

On the other hand, the draft Fortran 8x standard put out for public comment
removed these restrictions and I don't think anyone complained about that, so
eventually all Fortrans will probably let you do this (but that's no
consolation today).

Kurt W. Hirchert     hirchert@ncsa.uiuc.edu
National Center for Supercomputing Applications