Compatibility between Compaq Visual Fortran and gfortran

[Paul Thomas]

Jens,

Having been doing Disneyland with my daughter - hence the slow reply.  I 
strongly suggest that you spend some time with a good introductory text on 
fortran.  However, taking my last rendition:

program read_character
 implicit none
 character(len=4) :: ch(8)
 integer, dimension(10) :: nbuf
 integer, dimension(10, 20) :: npar
 integer                    :: i
!
! This next statement "overlaps" the third member of the integer array NBUF 
with the character array CH.
!
 equivalence (ch,nbuf(3))
 open (unit = 10, file = 'test.par', status = 'old')
 do i = 1, 20
!
! We now read the data as 2 integers and 8 character*4s
!
   read (10, '(2I3, 2X, 8A4)') nbuf(1:2), ch(1:8)
!
! Transfer the integer buffer, which contains the ASCII character codes
!
   npar(:, i) = nbuf
 end do
 close(10)
!
! Printing the last 8 integers in hex brings out the ASCII code for "TEST" ; 
54 53 45 54
!
 write (*,'(2i3,8z8)') npar     !check read is correct
end program read_character