[Info-vax] Fortran problem with QIO

[Steven Schweda]

gerr... at no.spam.mail.com wrote:

> It was my understanding that the %DESCR built-in function was always good
> whenever there was something to pass "by descriptor". Now I'm starting to
> think that that is correct only if "something" is a character string and not
> something else. Am I right? I'm just perusing $DSCDEF in FORSYSDEF.TLB and
> I'm wondering about its contents and what I have to pass to $QIO[W]...

   I haven't done any Fortran since it stopped being FORTRAN,
but I wouldn't trust %DESCR to build a good descriptor for
some odd-ball data structure.  (It's the default for
CHARACTER, as I recall, and it works fine there.)  Knowing
nothing, I'd build my own descriptors, and pass them in (by
reference/address) myself.  But my judgement could be warped
by too many years using C, where that's all I can do.

> You are Crazy!
> Nobody does that.
> [...]

   Probably true.  And there's also my favorite function,
FOR$RAB(), which lets you play with all the RAB/FAB/... stuff
after a normal OPEN.  (I wish that C had one like it.)