Premium
Dynamic strings in fortran 90
Author(s) -
Schonfelder J. L.,
Morgan J. S.
Publication year - 1990
Publication title -
software: practice and experience
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 0.437
H-Index - 70
eISSN - 1097-024X
pISSN - 0038-0644
DOI - 10.1002/spe.4380201206
Subject(s) - fortran , citation , computer science , library science , information retrieval , programming language
A substantially modified Draft Proposal for a revised ISO Fortran Standard (ISO DP-1539) has recently been subjected to a second round of public review and voting by National Standards bodies. The language as defined does not provide intrinsic support for dynamically sized character strings. In common with Ada, Fortran has chosen to consider these as a facility that is better provided as a semantic extension. In Fortran's case, this is achieved by use of a suitably designed MODULE; the analogue in Fortran of the Ada package. ISO has, in fact, requested that a suitable module be designed and adopted as a collateral standard. This paper looks at a possible design for such a module. It illustrates how facilities in the revised Fortran can be exploited to provide very different implementation which nevertheless have identical functionality and user interface. The facilities of Fortran for hiding the details of the implementations are exploited in such a way that an application employing such a module would be entirely unaffected by which version was actually used, except perhaps for its speed of execution