Re: Support for ENCODE & DECODE

[Steve Kargl <sgk at troutmask dot apl dot washington dot edu>]

On Sat, Jan 03, 2009 at 06:26:48PM -0700, Patrick C. Rose wrote:
> It would be of considerable help to some of us if gfortran would process 
> the ENCODE & DECODE statements.  I realize you're trying to be 
> Fortran-95 compliant and not Fortran-4, but some of my older code is 
> littered with them, and to re-write all of it would be dicey at best.
> 
> I can help test any gfortran changes that are made to support this. 
> Thank you.

ENCODE/DECODE have never been specified in any Fortran standard.
IMHO, gfortran should not be a dumping ground for a bunch of
questionable nonstandard constructs; particularly when perfectly
fine standard conforming code can be written.  See 

http://gcc.gnu.org/onlinedocs/gfortran/ENCODE-and-DECODE-statements.html

Yes, it's a pain to port one's code to a new compiler or platform, but
if you actual fix your code to be standard conforming it will work
with all compilers in the future.

Hopefully, you also understand that there are far too few gfortran
developers and far too many features to implement.

-- 
Steve