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> 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. Certainly true. > 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. Yes, but there is a chicken-and-egg problem here. It would probably be impossible to write something like Don Knuth's TeX in Fortran. He wrote it in Pascal. Is Pascal inherently more suited to the task than Fortran? Probably not in general, but I think in the field of text-string processing Fortran has some of the weaknesses which have been discussed here. Even if the CODE is in English, the input and output might need to deal with other languages. > 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. Well, as of FMMV, the character set defined by the Fortran standard is 8-bit. (Not for CODE, but that is not what is at issue here; I mean what is allowed in CHARACTER contexts.) (Actually, I'm sure the standard avoids mentioning something so low-level as "bit". :-) )