Dear list members:
While reading all this discussion about Fortran I/O, and possible
future directions, I thought I'd mention an old Fortran gripe: units 5
and 6.
Does anyone else find it irritating that they are basically a defacto
standard without actually being in the standard?
Fortran 90/95 took many of the best ideas from C, but didn't snag
stdin, stdout, and stderr. Even though we have the '*' unit
functionality, at minimum I'd like to see some standard way of at
least determining which unit numbers are pre-connected to standard
input and standard output. Why not do one of the following:
1. Make 5 and 6 explicitly part of the standard, or:
2. Add one or two intrisic integer-valued functions which return
these values, something like STDIN() and STDOUT().
--
John Jeffrey Venier, B.A., M.Stat. Programmer Analyst II
Section of Computer Science Department of Biomathematics
The University of Texas M.D. Anderson Cancer Center, Houston, Texas
[log in to unmask] +1 (713) 792-2622
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