Character Arguments in Intrinsic Procedures

To:	J3

From:	Craig Dedo

Date:	September 21, 2000

Subject:	Character Arguments in Intrinsic Procedures

Following up on a question on how assignment should be done to the CHARACTER arguments to the DATE_AND_TIME subroutine, I discovered that, with two exceptions, the Fortran standard never explicitly states what the length parameter of a CHARACTER argument to an intrinsic procedure is. It appears that up until now implementors and application developers alike have automatically assumed that such arguments are of assumed- length unless the description of an argument is explicitly specified in the description of the argument.

We should explicitly state that these dummy arguments follow the usual rules of character assignment and may have any length unless explicitly specified otherwise.

Edits.

[280:10+]	Add a note at the end of section 13.3.

Intrinsic procedures that assign values to arguments of type CHARACTER use character assignment rules (7.5.1.4).

[End of J3 / 00-297r1]