[patch, fortran, docs] Unformatted sequential and special files

[Tobias Burnus]

Thomas, what's actually the status of this patch? I think it was 
half-complete in September.

Tobias

On September 4, 2013 12:40, Janne Blomqvist wrote:
> On Tue, Sep 3, 2013 at 3:04 PM, Thomas Koenig <tkoenig@netcologne.de> wrote:
>> Hello world,
>>
>> here is a rewrite, which I hope make things more clear.
>> Unformatted sequential files are now made up of subrecords, where
>> a logical record may only have one.
> Looks ok.
>
>> Regarding block devices: I don't know anybody who ever used them
>> from gfortran, so I tried to be as vague as possible.
>>
>> Any more suggestions?  OK for trunk otherwise?
> I'm still not comfortable with the wording. As I've argued before,
> special files are special in different ways, and can behave
> differently on different systems, so it's difficult to say anything
> definitive about their behavior in general. Maybe being more explicit
> about what is supported for a limited subset would help. E.g. starting
> the section with something like
>
> "For terminal devices, pipes, FIFO's and sockets the following file
> modes are supported:
> - ...
>
> For other special files and other file modes, the result is undefined."
>
> ("undefined" rather than "not supported", as we're not going out of
> our way to prevent it if somebody wants to do it either)
>
> - Wrt the POS= specifier with INQUIRE, even it it "works" (as in, does
> not generate an error), there is no sensible concept of file position
> for a stream file anyway, so perhaps we shouldn't explicitly say it's
> supported either.
>
> - Wrt. block devices, perhaps remove that section and cover it just
> with the "...implementation defined" sentence above.
>
>
>