Compatibility between Compaq Visual Fortran and gfortran

[Paul Thomas]

Jens,

For my taste, the neatest solution would be to take my example and transfer 
the vector buffer in to the array, for each line read.   Tested but without 
any warranty:

program read_character
  implicit none
  character(len=4) :: ch(8)
  integer, dimension(10) :: nbuf
  integer, dimension(10, 20) :: npar
  integer                    :: i
  equivalence (ch,nbuf(3))
  open (unit = 10, file = 'test.par', status = 'old')
  do i = 1, 20
    read (10, '(2I3, 2X, 8A4)') nbuf(1:2), ch(1:8)
    npar(:, i) = nbuf
  end do
  close(10)
  write (*,'(2i3,8z8)') npar     !check read is correct
end program read_character

It has the advantage of being standard fortran and being easy to understand. 
The buffer transfers will take a relatively miniscule amount of time to 
execute.