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Path: utzoo!watmath!watnot!watdcsu!herbie
From: herbie@watdcsu.UUCP (Herb Chong - DCS)
Newsgroups: net.lang
Subject: Re: What language do you use for scientific programming?
Message-ID: <1621@watdcsu.UUCP>
Date: Tue, 20-Aug-85 10:29:37 EDT
Article-I.D.: watdcsu.1621
Posted: Tue Aug 20 10:29:37 1985
Date-Received: Sat, 24-Aug-85 00:06:52 EDT
References: <909@oddjob.UUCP> <163@ho95e.UUCP> <367@ttrdc.UUCP> <1612@watdcsu.UUCP> <371@ttrdc.UUCP>
Reply-To: herbie@watdcsu.UUCP (Herb Chong - DCS)
Organization: U of Waterloo
Lines: 39
Summary: 

In article <371@ttrdc.UUCP> levy@ttrdc.UUCP (Daniel R. Levy) writes:
>Actually, Unix' f77 allows byte input to be done on any file which can be
>seeked upon--you do something like
>
>      character abyte
>      integer n
>      open(unit=1,file='foo.bar',access='direct',form='unformatted',
>     +     recl=1)
>      n=[whatever]
>      read [write] (unit=1,rec=n,err=nnn)abyte
>
>but this will bomb on a system like VMS when the type of file you are trying
>to input from (output to) was created with a different structure.  It is also
>impossible to do this on terminal I/O, or on standard input/output.  It would
>be nice if you could mix different types of access with different file struc-
>tures and have the I/O routines deal with this in a sane manner.  Then you
>could have your bytes and eat them too :-).

this is only workable, as you point out, on a system where you can open
files with arbitrary attributes like unix.  on systems where the
underlying filesystem is record oriented, doing this requires a lot of
runtime library support.  many fortran 77 implementations would
disallow the open statement changing the record length at execution
time.  if portability is not an issue, then there should be no problem,
but then why not use C to begin with, if the mathematical library is
adequate.  i avoid fortran like the plague, despite it being the first
programming language i learned and will use PL/I for the application
rather than put up with the limited control structures and I/O
facilities of fortran.  even pascal is fine if you don't need separate
compilation and the math library is adequate.

Herb Chong...

I'm user-friendly -- I don't byte, I nybble....

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