Clive Page wrote:
>On Mon, 13 Dec 1999, Phillip Helbig wrote:
>
>> If ENDFILE is not portable in this case, what good is it at all?
>
>I don't think ENDFILE is any use at all. I have not (in the last decade
>at least) encountered a single Fortran system which did anything with
>ENDFILE at all. You can detect end-of-file condition in a file which
>doesn't have it (thank goodness, or a whole lot of code would fail), and
>any attempt to play clever tricks by having a pseduo-endfile record midway
>through a file will fail on most if not all platforms.
>
>I think the Standards Committee should have declared ENDFILE to be
>obsolete. Does anyone disagree?
To your last sentence .. NO.
In over thirty years of programming (mainly Fortran, of course), on several OSs,
picking up old code and more recently code from the 'net, I can not remember any
code which used ENDFILE. I could have overlooked some, but ...
If the standards committee can declare obsolescent/deprecated (or whatever
terminology) syntax which does appear in old code (arithmetic IF, etc.) why not
get rid of syntax that has only been used by one elderly grandmother in
Antarctica? (I should add grandfather so as not to be seen as sexist :-); there
are undoubtedly some very proficient Fortran programming grandmothers in
Antarctica, whom I would hate to slight.)
[Now the ENDFILE users will come out of the closet :-)]
Regards, Paddy
Paddy O'Brien,
System Planning,
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.
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