From jkr@jkr.cc.rl.ac.uk Thu Aug 24 14:51:09 2000 Received: from nameserv.rl.ac.uk (nameserv.rl.ac.uk [130.246.135.129]) by dkuug.dk (8.9.2/8.9.2) with ESMTP id OAA19257 for ; Thu, 24 Aug 2000 14:51:09 +0200 (CEST) (envelope-from jkr@jkr.cc.rl.ac.uk) Received: from jkr.cc.rl.ac.uk (jkr.cc.rl.ac.uk [130.246.8.20]) by nameserv.rl.ac.uk (8.8.8/8.8.8) with ESMTP id NAA26893 for ; Thu, 24 Aug 2000 13:51:08 +0100 Received: (from jkr@localhost) by jkr.cc.rl.ac.uk (8.8.8+Sun/8.8.8) id NAA29379 for SC22WG5@dkuug.dk; Thu, 24 Aug 2000 13:52:15 +0100 (BST) Date: Thu, 24 Aug 2000 13:52:15 +0100 (BST) From: John Reid Message-Id: <200008241252.NAA29379@jkr.cc.rl.ac.uk> To: SC22WG5@dkuug.dk Subject: Interpretation 23 MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset="us-ascii" We struck a problem at Oulu which I would like to air with you all. Suppose a formatted sequential file is positioned in the middle of a record because it has just performed a nonadvancing read or write statement. Suppose there are n characters from the current point to the end of the record. Now perform a write of less than n characters. Is the length of the record unchanged and are the characters at the end of the record retained? At [136:44], we find: For sequential access on output, if there is a current record, the file position is not changed and the current record becomes the last record of the file. Otherwise, a new record is created as the next record of the file; this new record becomes the last and current record of the file and the file is positioned at the beginning of this record. This makes it clear that all records beyond the current record are lost, but what about the data in the current record beyond the current point? The Oulu subgroup thought that this was the intention and worked out an edit to the above paragraph. Doubts were expressed in the main group. Another view is that the data should be retained since this paragraph does not say that it is lost. Should it make any difference whether the previous statement was a read or a write? I tried this program on the five compilers to which I have access program main character(4)word character(10)line integer size open(11) write(11,'(a)')'1234567890' rewind 11 read(11,'(a)', advance='no')word write(11,'(a)', advance='yes')word rewind 11 read(11,'(a)',advance='no',eor=10, size=size)line 10 write(*,*)' line=',line write(*,*)' size=',size rewind 11 write(11,'(a,TL6)', advance='no')'1234567890' write(11,'(a)', advance='yes')word rewind 11 read(11,'(a)',advance='no',eor=20, size=size)line 20 write(*,*)' line=',line write(*,*)' size=',size end program and the reported sizes were: SUN 8 10 EPC 8 10 Nag 8 10 DEC 10 10 Fujitsu 8 8 What do you think? John.