Xref: utzoo comp.lang.fortran:1694 misc.legal:6956
Path: utzoo!utgpu!watmath!clyde!att!ucbvax!decwrl!sun!chiba!khb
From: khb%chiba@Sun.COM (Keith Bierman - Sun Tactical Engineering)
Newsgroups: comp.lang.fortran,misc.legal
Subject: Re: An exercise in futility
Keywords: portability vs vendor_extensions the_Brooks_Report
Message-ID: <84888@sun.uucp>
Date: 11 Jan 89 19:51:21 GMT
References: <585@mbph.UUCP> <207@mic.UUCP> <3131@ttrdc.UUCP>
Sender: news@sun.uucp
Reply-To: khb@sun.UUCP (Keith Bierman - Sun Tactical Engineering)
Organization: Sun Microsystems, Mountain View
Lines: 48

In article <3131@ttrdc.UUCP> levy@ttrdc.UUCP (Daniel R. Levy) writes:
>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.
>-- 

Happy to oblige:

3.1 _FORTRAN Character Set_

The FORTRAN character set consists of twenty six letters, ten digits,
and thirteen special characters.

3.1.1 _Letters_. A _letter_ is one of the twenty six charters 

	A B C D ... Z

(* which are what are commonly referred to as upper case *)

3.1.2 _Digits_

	etc

I don't have a list of bugs in the Feldman & Weinberger compiler, but
it was quite extensive. The base f77 compiler which they produced was,
to be brutally frank, one of the worst fortran compilers I have ever
used. All vendors have put lots of work in to fix it up over the
years, and unix compilers are now (for the most part) quite good.


-- 
Keith H. Bierman
It's Not My Fault ---- I Voted for Bill & Opus
Keith H. Bierman
It's Not My Fault ---- I Voted for Bill & Opus