[Info-vax] Text processing examples with Fortran requested

[Bob Koehler]

In article <iOudnQ2-U6rSIp3WnZ2dnUVZ_uOdnZ2d at giganews.com>, "Richard B. Gilbert" <rgilbert88 at comcast.net> writes:
> 
> If you use two or more, you are faced with the problem of "packing" and 
> "unpacking" the data.  I don't believe that either Fortran II or Fortran 
>   66 supported a character data type.

   Fortran-IV (aka -66) has standard character constants in single quotes.
   How they pack into other data types is machine dependent.  I know of
   a large package developed on IBM mainframes Fortran-IV in which strings 
   are routinely stuffed into arrays of REAL*8.  We ported it to a VAX
   under VMS 2.x and these were not a problem.

   We've got a ton of code developed on PDP-11 with two characters
   per integer, that's been running for a couple of decades on VAX
   with the simple expedient of making sure they are all explicity
   declared INTEGER*2.