-frecord-marker

[Keith Bennett]

On Fri, Jul 21, 2006, Adrian Umpleby wrote:
> I'm sure there are other research groups whoe have unformatted data written out by Fortran-based
> applications that were written and compiled by others (i.e. without source available, and may no
> longer even be officially supported). All of this data contains 32 bit record markers.

Not just research groups. I know of several fairly high profile companies
and organisations (including the one that I work for) who write libraries
in Fortran. These libraries have to be able to read files written by
external programs.
With the present state of affairs, gfortran just isn't usable.

> I spent a couple of days sweating (literally, in this heat here in the UK at the moment) over why
> our codes were totally failing to read the old data when compiled with gfortran. Once I discovered
> the answer I was quite shocked.

I have long been amazed at this projects willingness to break compatibility
with every other Fortran compiler out there. And that includes g77 which
this project is meant to be replacing. I'm well aware that you're never
going to be fully compatible with everyone else but you can at least *try*.
All the other compilers do.

Keith.