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).