[Info-vax] Text processing examples with Fortran requested

[Bob Koehler]

In article <hdum39$sv$3 at naig.caltech.edu>, glen herrmannsfeldt <gah at ugcs.caltech.edu> writes:
> 
> Otherwise, I don't believe that you are supposed to change constants,
> numeric or not.

   Your not supposed to, but we had code that did.  So when I ported
   the code to a VAX, I created a local variable and put it back after
   it got stepped on.  This greatly increased execution time because
   the value was being used as an "initialize once" flag.

   If I had known that, I would have just set the variable in a data
   statement.
 
> K&R C allowed changing of character constants, though that feature
> was removed in the ANSI standard, it is still supported by some
> compilers.

   The last time I saw a K&R book, it had the ANSI standard covered,
   and examples where string constants were written over.  This, of
   course, ACCVIO'd on our Alpha and I had to explain to the programmer
   that one some systems constants really are.

   And there are still lost of systems out there today which don't have
   the memory management capabilities necessary to write a page into
   RAM and then mark the page read-only, or don't make use of it.