Question about Hollerith formatting

[Tobias Schlüter]

Richard E Maine wrote:
> On Sep 13, 2005, at 2:23 AM, Feng Wang wrote:
> 
> 
>>But obviously, elements of
>>character array should be allowed. So from this point, to keep 
>>consistency, we
>>allow elements of other type is also logical.

I'm sorry I used the word "logical".  As I said, I thought all this had never
been specified in a language standard, and that's why I invoked logic to
prefer one specification over another.

> I repeat and reemphasize my recommendation to stick with what the 
> standard said on this, supplemented only if absolutely necessary by 
> other existing practice. I think that you should *NOT* be trying to 
> redesign this feature based on some notion of "logic". Doing that will 
> result in spending a lot of time redoing what people have done before. 

I never planned to redesign Hollerith formatting -- impossible as it may seem,
punch cards aren't the only way of using a computer nowadays -- , I just tried
to find out what we want to allow, as I said, pgf90 accepts it, Intel doesn't.

> If a user has code that depends on things like using array elements for 
> Hollerith, then that code is already nonportable, has been for a long 
> time, and should just be fixed. It is darned unlikely that there are 
> huge volumes of code like that, because there are too many compilers 
> that it won't work on (like most compilers).

Agreed.

Thanks for the input,
- Tobi