Question about Hollerith formatting

[Feng Wang]

--- Richard E Maine <Richard.Maine@nasa.gov> 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.
> 
> No, elements of a character array are not allowed... not as a 
> Hollerith.

Your adverbial is a little far :-)

> By definition, Hollerith involves having character data in a 
> non-character data object. If it is a character type, then it isn't 
> Hollerith. You can use a character array element as a format, but 
> that's because you can use a general character expression, of which a 
> character array element is a trivial case.
> 

As a compiler developer, I considered more from implementing side.

> 
> I repeat and reemphasize my recommendation to stick with what the 
> standard said on this, supplemented only if absolutely necessary by 
> other existing practice. 

Agree.

> I think that you should *NOT* be trying to 
> redesign this feature based on some notion of "logic". Doing that will 

All what we did for Hollerith is just to make gfortran support legacy codes and
satisfy more users' need. Since no one use Hollerith to develop new codes, we
don't want to do any extension of it.

> 
> 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).
> 

Agree.

> -- 
> Richard Maine                |  Good judgment comes from experience;
> Richard.Maine@nasa.gov       |  experience comes from bad judgment.
>                              |        -- Mark Twain
> 

And agree more.



Best Regards,
Feng Wang

--
Creative Compiler Research Group,
National University of Defense Technology, China.


		
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