> Date: Fri, 9 Dec 2005 09:34:02 -0500
> From: Aleksandar Donev <[log in to unmask]>
> Richard E Maine wrote:
>
> > Indeed. I understand the "done before" part, independent of language
> > issues. But I have no idea why this would be "not particularly suited to
> > Fortran". I personally have a horrid time dealing with even the most
> > trivial of string processing tasks using C.
> C is certainly no role model (for pretty much anything), as I already
> said. But I personally find Fortran's character facilities rather
> limiting and poorely designed (by virtue of history mostly). Not
> "horrid", but certainly not enticing for a job like a parser. Maybe
> finally with F2003's allocatable (variable-length) strings it is
> starting to look descent. But I still dislike the unsymmetric treatment
> of character arrays of length L and characters with kind length L...
>
> > Part of this might be a function of me as much as the language
> Of course, of course, if there is no product that one can use then one
> should write in a language that is comfortable, even if it is not the
> "best" one. I've written things in Fortran just because I can do it most
> quickly in Fortran merely be knowing it best.
>
> Speaking of comparing languages, this mention of PL/I made me look into
> it (I had only heard of it but literally did not know anything). If
> someone knows both Fortran 2003 and PL/I, a question: Is there some area
> where PL/I still has far richer feature set than Fortran? From the quick
> skim exception handling came to mind. I always like looking at other
> languages to get design ideas...
Apart from exception handling, other areas include character facilities
(or should I say, string handling, because as well as varying strings,
multi-byte strings are supported), along with a host of built-in functions;
decimal arithmetic; I/O (including recursive I/O); and
date handling (with many built-in functions such as day of week,
displaying and transforming dates in some 40 patterns, etc); and a
date data type.
> Thanks,
> Aleks
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