Path: utzoo!attcan!uunet!lll-winken!lll-tis!helios.ee.lbl.gov!pasteur!agate!violet.berkeley.edu!jerry
From: jerry@violet.berkeley.edu ( Jerry Berkman )
Newsgroups: comp.lang.fortran
Subject: Re: Position after Open
Message-ID: <16690@agate.BERKELEY.EDU>
Date: 8 Nov 88 15:32:27 GMT
References: <220@taux02.UUCP> <6690021@hpclcdb.HP.COM>
Sender: usenet@agate.BERKELEY.EDU
Organization: University of California, Berkeley
Lines: 19

In article <6690021@hpclcdb.HP.COM> cdb@hpclcdb.HP.COM (Carl Burch) writes:

>The Fortran 77 standard doesn't say, which defaults to "processor-dependent".
>I know of at least one implementation that sets the initial position to the
>end, while the others I know of offhand open it at the beginning.

>If we ever get the Fortran 8x standard out, one of the additions to the OPEN
>statement is the POSITION= specifier, which takes a scalar character expression
>that evaluate to 'ASIS', 'REWIND', or 'APPEND'.  The default is 'ASIS', which
>(if the file is not previously connected) means the position is "unspecified"-
>a.k.a. "processor-dependent".

The standard should specify that files are opened at the beginning.
Most users expect this, and most implementations do open files at the
beginning.  BSD f77 used to open files at the end; this confused users.
We changed it about 5(?) years ago to open files at the beginning.
No one ever complained about the change, and I no longer have to explain
this idiosyncracy to confused users.
	- Jerry Berkman, UC Berkeley,
	  jerry@violet.berkeley.edu