-frecord-marker

[Brooks Moses]

Adrian Umpleby wrote:
> The syntax goes like this (the idea being that RECM has some conceptual relationship to RECL):
> 
> OPEN( ..., RECM='4' )
> 
> I left it as a character string, ready for other possibilities such as 'HP', or 'INTEL', which
> were mentioned in past correspondence on the topic. 'G77' is also allowed as a synonym for '4',
> and 'GFORTRAN' is a synonym for '8' (that's the theory, anyway...) - perhaps there are some other
> ideas about this...?

I want to add my agreement to the suggestion that this should be 
RECORD_MARKER, not RECM.  I think it's important that non-standard 
extensions be readable by people who are not familiar with the extension.

Similarly, I think that if this is a to be character string (and I agree 
that it should be), that property should be exploited to enhance 
readability as well; the values should be '4BYTE' and '8BYTE', not just 
'4' and '8'.

Also, I don't like 'GFORTRAN' as a synonym for '8BYTE', as it is most 
certainly not a guarantee that it will read any file written by 
gfortran!  If you must have a synonym for the default choice, use 'DEFAULT'.

- Brooks