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Sure, you can process most ANYTHING by coding it into an integer array. You can even get a bit of help with the encoding from ICHAR etc. However, you can't apply CHARACTER OPERATIONS to an array, such as comparison ops ( < >= etc in "lexicographic" order, INDEX, etc.) That's why the CHARACTER intrinsic data type was invented in F77. I remember a lengthy debate on exactly this issue at that time - i.e., whether a sequence of characters needs special STRING operations or whether some extended ARRAY ops would suffice. = Even when F90 came out, there were still a lot of systems whose default character set was EBCDIC. (Maybe there are still some of them.) I think the growing popularity of C throughout the 1980s forced most systems to ASCII (or some ISO character set not too different from ASCII). But I think some early F90 systems may have had one KIND for EBCDIC and a different KIND for ASCII. = Loren P Meissner -----Original Message----- From: [log in to unmask] [mailto:[log in to unmask]] On Behalf Of James Giles Sent: Friday, October 27, 2000 11:08 AM To: Robert Kernell; [log in to unmask] Subject: Re: character kinds [...] I suppose you could process them as integer arrays using the Latin-1 collating sequence and no actual character literals, [...] %%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%