Support for ENCODE & DECODE

[Arjen Markus]

>
> ENCODE/DECODE have never been specified in any Fortran standard.
> IMHO, gfortran should not be a dumping ground for a bunch of
> questionable nonstandard constructs; particularly when perfectly
> fine standard conforming code can be written.  See
>
> http://gcc.gnu.org/onlinedocs/gfortran/ENCODE-and-DECODE-statements.html
>
> Yes, it's a pain to port one's code to a new compiler or platform, but
> if you actual fix your code to be standard conforming it will work
> with all compilers in the future.
>
> Hopefully, you also understand that there are far too few gfortran
> developers and far too many features to implement.
>

Actually, if the ENCODE/DECODE statements work the way shown in the
above link, then it should be a simple matter to use, say, the
C preprocessor or sed to turn these statements into more regular
Fortran code.

Regards,

Arjen