Path: utzoo!attcan!uunet!lll-winken!lll-lcc!ames!nrl-cmf!ukma!rutgers!njin!princeton!phoenix!pucc!EACELARI
From: EACELARI@pucc.Princeton.EDU (Edward A Celarier)
Newsgroups: comp.lang.fortran
Subject: Re: Any way to fseek() in MS-Fortran under DOS?
Message-ID: <5683@pucc.Princeton.EDU>
Date: 16 Jul 88 19:02:58 GMT
References: <5462@orstcs.CS.ORST.EDU> <1450@pembina.UUCP>
Reply-To: EACELARI@pucc.Princeton.EDU
Distribution: na
Organization: Princeton University, NJ
Lines: 17
Disclaimer: Author bears full responsibility for contents of this article

In article <1450@pembina.UUCP>, simon@alberta.UUCP (Simon Tortike) writes:
>                            .. Rather than reading the whole line in, I
>always call a "get comment" subroutine that reads in the first character
>of every line until it finds a line which is not commented out.  The routine
>then backspaces one record and returns to the calling program.  The read
>statements in the original program do not need to be altered, one only has
>to call the comment-eater before reading in a record. Surely that's easier than
>reading the entire line first?
 
 
Perhaps so, but if the particular implementation you are using literally
backspaces a device (not necessary for "blocked" files, unless the
records are particularly long), this can really slow things down!
 
I don't know the reason for the screwy Fortran standard, and, in fact, I
was a bit surprised.  All the machines I've been working on for the last
couple of years (VAX/VMS and Gould) have surreptitiously supported
reading free-formattedly from an internal file (character variable).