Richard Maine wrote,

>Phillip Helbig writes:
> > Paddy writes:
> > > uppercase (or lowercase).
> > >
> > > Though F2K is getting close (only 3/4 years down the
> > > track) shouldn't such an intrinsic be easily acceptable?
>
> > The question is, in the strict formal sense required by the standard, is
> > "lower case" sufficiently well defined?...
>
>I once proposed (unoficially and orally) such an intrinsic,
>and Phillip has basically sumarized the reply I got.  It was
>obvious that this had been discussed before.  I didn't pursue
>it further (with questions like "well how about the easy cases;
>that would still be useful".  Such questions occurred to me, but
>it didn't seem worth arguing further at the time).

Hmm,  I am only used to ASCII codes these days (used to work on IBM about 20+
years ago with EBCDIC).

Someone suggested in this thread that such an intrinsic should only be aligned
to EBCDIC or ASCII.  Surely each vendor knows what they support -- EBCDIC,
ASCII, Unicode or the 8-bit that Phillip referred to.  No offense to Phillip,
but I would think that some of the esoterics of German case (or French, Spanish
accents, etc.) are a very minor problem in the programming community.  We seem
to have a lot of meteorologists here from around Europe, and I would hazard a
guess that because of portability between nations that English characters are
used.

Robin Vowels responded with a snippet of code which is one of the variants we
have in our applications: indexation between an upper/lower case array.

Do I assume that the only way that ADJUSTL/R came into being was because the
blank character has the same representation in all the aforementioned systems?

Robin's code would cover all cases, and could possibly be extended by vendors to
cover the 8-bit as per Phillip.

What the heck, ADJUSTL is virtually irrelevant for me (graphics or screen
prettiness usage) with the I0 and F0 formats.  But our code is riddled with a
"to_upper" and it's user multifarious variants.

My vendor has seen the "sense of this" and provides a run-time library routine
that does this.  Probably other vendors do similar.  Isn't this only one step
from making it an intrinsic that aids portability?

When TRIM and friends came in as intrinsics, I went through all our applications
and removed all references to local routines and vendor supplied.  I would love
to do the same here.

Regardless of Phillip's and Richard's comments, this should be simple IF IT IS
RESTRICTED TO THE CHARACTER SET DEFINED BY THE FORTRAN STANDARD.  Sorry to
shout, but isn't this a good basis for a manifoldly (such a word :-) used
function.

Regards, Paddy

Paddy O'Brien,
Transmission Development,
TransGrid,
PO Box A1000, Sydney South,
NSW 2000, Australia

Tel:   +61 2 9284-3063
Fax:   +61 2 9284-3050
Email: [log in to unmask]

Either "\'" or "\s" (to escape the apostrophe) seems to work for most people,
but that little whizz-bang apostrophe gives me little spam.