[Info-vax] GCC for VMS, was: Re: fortran compiler roadmap?

[Ken Fairfield]

On Monday, April 22, 2013 2:45:47 PM UTC-7, Johnny Billquist wrote:
[...]
> I also seem to remember that strings in Fortran 77 under VMS could 
> actually be dynamic in length, but I might be remembering wrong. Too 
> long since I worked on that.

Well, VMS supports dynamic strings, especially for those 
languages that require them (Basic?).  But the Fortran 
compiler does not *directly* support them.  It's sort of
about standard compliance.  (Dynamic allocation of arrays,
etc., came in F90, dynamically allocatable character 
variables has only just been standardized in F2008).

But there are library (LIB$) routines available that allow
the user to use dynamic strings within a Fortran 
program.  It's usually in conjunction with calling some
procedure (written in another language) which requires a
dynamic string as an argument.  The particular case I recall
involved calls to Callable TPU...

    -Ken