No, I didn't try TRANSFER. I actually had to look it up to see what it does, and it still isn't totally clear to me. It seems to be a "move" of sorts, and is something that was added in Fortran 95. I am not sure what I would do with it. I think the issue is more in the routines that call the data manager; that routine just gets an argument vector that is ostensibly "real," and does only copying to move things around, not really caring about the type of data "in the box," as you put it. The code for this was written back in the mid 80s to the Fortran 77 standard, and I haven't had any need to upgrade it. I don't plan to upgrade it until forced to do so or at least a "good" portable solution is at hand.
Perhaps someone familiar with the equivalence issue can explain why equivalence of character and non-character entities is not allowed in the standard, particularly since doing so can be implemented by a compiler; Lahey has allowed this override since F77L. I suppose it can be an issue if a machine architecture is such that an integer or real word size is not an even multiple of character size. But character strings have to be put somewhere, in the same kind of real memory as numeric data occupy, and they have locations. So why shouldn't the starting point of a string be controllable? Boundary alignment issues?
RAR
-----Original Message-----
From: Fortran 90 List [mailto:[log in to unmask]]On Behalf
Of Alvaro Fernandez
Sent: Tuesday, March 09, 2004 5:23 PM
To: [log in to unmask]
Subject: Re: Data type "UNDEFINED"
I'm curious: Did you try TRANSFER(), or was it too slow?
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