Xref: utzoo comp.lang.fortran:1691 misc.legal:6950
Path: utzoo!utgpu!watmath!clyde!att!ttrdc!levy
From: levy@ttrdc.UUCP (Daniel R. Levy)
Newsgroups: comp.lang.fortran,misc.legal
Subject: Re: An exercise in futility
Keywords: portability vs vendor_extensions the_Brooks_Report
Message-ID: <3131@ttrdc.UUCP>
Date: 11 Jan 89 03:55:42 GMT
References: <585@mbph.UUCP> <207@mic.UUCP>
Lines: 21

In article <207@mic.UUCP>, d25001@mic.UUCP (Carrington Dixon) writes:
> The X3.9-1978 not only madates that identifiers be
> no more than six characters long; it also defines the character set as
> consisting _ONLY_ of the UPPER-CASE letters.

Could someone please quote chapter and verse.  The paper "A Portable FORTRAN
77 Compiler", by Feldman and Weinberger, seems to imply a reading of the
standard that calls for a monocase alphabet but doesn't specify what case.
This shows (in the UNIX f77 compiler, which resulted from Feldman and Wein-
berger's work) in the mapping of uppercase identifiers to lowercase for the
linker, and the fact that lowercase values are expected for parameters in
statements like OPEN(UNIT=1,STATUS='scratch') and lowercase values are
returned by statements like INQUIRE(UNIT=1,ACCESS=CHRSTR).  For all I know
this is an erroneous interpretation, but they don't seem to think so (they
name the only three ways they think their compiler deviates from the standard,
and case handling isn't among them).  It's a pain in porting code, obviously.
-- 
Daniel R. Levy             UNIX(R) mail:  att!ttbcad!levy
AT&T Bell Laboratories
5555 West Touhy Avenue     Any opinions expressed in the message above are
Skokie, Illinois  60077    mine, and not necessarily AT&T's.