Public Review Comment #9 by Arjen Markus

To:	J3

From:	Craig Dedo

Date:	November 11, 2002

Subject:	Public Review Comment #9 by Arjen Markus

Public Review Comment #9

From: Arjen Markus [arjen.markus@wldelft.nl]

Sent: Thursday, October 31, 2002 4:38 AM

To: Donovan, Deborah

Subject: Comments w.r.t. Fortran 2000

Dear madam,

I approach you directly, instead of via my national standards body,

because I could not find the proper address.

I would like to send you the following comments on the draft Fortran

2000

standard. They may be small details, but I would appreciate it if you

could pass them on.

My main source of information is the latest issue of the Fortran Forum,

which describes this standard.

The intrinsic module ISO_FORTRAN_ENV should in my opinion contain

as much of the environment as possible, certainly those items that

may be of influence on the working of the Fortran program. I think

the following are missing:

1. Indication of big-endian or little-endian format for the

representation of numbers.

If this information is known at run-time certain operations,

like reading binary files from other sources can be made essentially

platform-independent.

2. Unit used for the record length of direct-access files.

Right now this is a piece of information that influences the results

enormously and is difficult (though not impossible) to assess at

run-time.

3. Some indication of the file system when one has to construct proper

file names, for instance, the character used to separate directory

names.

4. The maximum length of messages from the IOMSG= keyword.

That way, one can simply declare a string like:

CHARACTER(LEN=MAX_MSG_LENGTH) :: string

and be sure that the message is saved in its entirety

Other comments:

5. Does FLUSH allow the flusing of the standard output

(FLUSH(OUTPUT_UNIT)

would work as I expect?)

6. Is there a way to influence the rounding mode for calculations (it is

possible for formatted output)

7. The current way of interfacing C and Fortran (via essentially

FORTRAN77

constructs and platform-dependent encoding in C) will still work?

Kind regards,

Arjen Markus

References

02-007r3, Fortran 2000 Committee Draft

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