Bug (or mis-feature) in g77 sequential file format

[Juan Rivero]

On Tue, Sep 22, 1998 at 07:51:54AM -0400, Craig Burley wrote:
> >It turns out that this version of g77 for the alpha uses 8 bytes for the
> >record's header and trailer (which hold the record length), while the very
> >same g77 version on my PC running FreeBSD uses 4 bytes. The standard DEC
> >Fortran compiler also uses 4-byte headers and trailers. This means that I
> >cannot share binary files. 
> 
> I'm afraid that's a general problem in the computer industry.  Some
> compiler vendors work around it, causing other problems in the process
> (e.g. by wasting space on 32-bit systems like PCs, or by not
> supporting records longer than 2^32 bytes on 64-bit systems like
> Alphas).

> [snip]
> The upshot is, for portable I/O, use either formatted I/O or hand-roll
> binary I/O using libU77 and/or C code.  Neither is ideal, however,
> which is why it'd be nice to have g77 offer some better choices
> someday.
> 

One platform-independent possibility is to use NCSA's Hierarchical Data
Format, available from

   http://hdf.ncsa.uiuc.edu/

(Can use it right now; no need to wait for g77 to do something about
unformatted I/O.)

JR
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Dr. Juan Rivero				email juanr@averroes.ivic.ve
Centro de Quimica                       WWW    http://averroes.ivic.ve/
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