From waveren@delft.geco.slb.com Thu Jul 16 13:03:01 1992
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From: Matthijs van Waveren <Matthijs.van.Waveren@delft.geco.slb.com>
Message-Id: <199207161100.AA00560@fulmar.delft.geco.slb.com>
Subject: comments on ISO_VARYING_STRING
To: sc22wg5@dkuug.dk
Date: Thu, 16 Jul 92 13:00:23 MET DST
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Hi,

I am passing on some comments on ISO_VARYING_STRING which were made by 
a dutch colleague.

============================================================================
> The following is a reaction to document N1060-Working Draft on Amendment 1
> to ISO/IEC 1539:1991 Fortran on: Varying Length Character Strings.
> 
> This reaction makes no attempt at completeness. It just list the two
> remarks that surfaced my mind when leafing through the document.
> 
> Remark 1.
>    Paragraph 2.3.3 Comparisons contains the following sentence:
>    "The comparisons are done as if shorter strings were padded on the
>    right with blanks."
>    In my opinion this is a very bad counterintuitive idea. An example:
> 	IF ( "" .EQ. " " )
>    will fail. I think unexpectedly. Length is an integral part of a string.
>    Strings of different length should never be considered equal.
> 
> Remark 2.
>    Paragraph 2.6.1 The READ_STRING procedure has curious behavior when
>    called with a `set' argument. The terminal character (if there is one)
>    is read from the input stream, but is not included in the result string.
>    The file position after the read is just after the terminal character.
>    Thus there seems to be no way to retrieve that terminal character. It is
>    lost. In my eyes this seriously diminishes the usefulness of this
>    facility.
> 
> Ed Keizer					tel: +31 20 548 5777
> Faculteit Wiskunde & Informatika		fax: +31 20 642 7705
> Vrije Universiteit				e-mail: keie@cs.vu.nl
> De Boelelaan 1081A, 1081 HV  Amsterdam, The Netherlands
> 
============================================================================

-- 
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| Matthijs van Waveren                                   |
| Schlumberger/GECO PRAKLA R&D and ISO/WG5               |
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