g77 inconsistency?

[Christos Tountas]

Hello,

"Ugly" initialization of numeric variables with text strings seems
to work for some types of numeric variables only.

The following works:
     integer i
     data i /'abcd'/

But this does not:
     real*8 r
     data r /'abcdefgh'/

More than a dozen compilers  on different platforms over the years
have done this correctly. Cannot get g77 to do it with
any combination of options. I have a lot of old code that needs it.
Any hope?

CT