Fortran - Re: Why these original FORTRAN quirks?; Now : Programming practices

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Re: Why these original FORTRAN quirks?; Now : Programming practices

Walter Spector

2006-10-30, 7:15 pm

"Rostyslaw J. Lewyckyj" wrote:
>
> The problem with M77 is that the library routines did not handle
> the empty input buffer at EOF correctly (At least from the interactive
> terminal that you were using). They should not have even attempted
> FORMAT interpretation.

Well, one, of many..., funny things about Fortran 66 was that there was
no way to detect end-of-file in a READ statement. Somehow the programmer
was supposed to magically glean that there were no more records to be
read. So there was some controversy over what to do when reading the
'endfile' record.

The END= in the READ statement was an extension added to many
compilers - including the MNF compiler. In CDC-land, they used
the EOF function to find out if the unit was at end-of-file.

Funny how C++ has some of the same problems 40 years later...

Walt

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