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From: glen herrmannsfeldt on 11 Aug 2010 00:53
Richard Maine <nospam(a)see.signature> wrote:
> glen herrmannsfeldt <gah(a)ugcs.caltech.edu> wrote:

>> UNFORMATTED works well for Fortran programs writing files to
>> be read by the same program other Fortran programs.

> It works well for C interop and all kinds of other things as well.
> "Unformatted" is not a synonym for "sequential unformatted", which I am
> (almost) sure is what you mean. There has long (well, since f77) also
> been direct access unformatted, and there is now also stream
> unformatted.
(snip)

> I would say that stream unformatted is the preferred choice for
> interoperability in modern Fortran. Taking the unqualified "unformatted"
> to imply sequential unformatted is increasingly likely to confuse and
> mislead people into thinking that what you say also applies to stream
> unformatted. That is, after all, what the normal interpretation of the
> English would mean.

Right for the interpretation of the English, but the default
for ACCESS is 'SEQUENTIAL'.

-- glen

From: Richard Maine on 11 Aug 2010 01:25
glen herrmannsfeldt <gah(a)ugcs.caltech.edu> wrote:

> Richard Maine <nospam(a)see.signature> wrote:

> > "Unformatted" is not a synonym for "sequential unformatted",

> Right for the interpretation of the English, but the default
> for ACCESS is 'SEQUENTIAL'.

Yes, but unless I am more confused than usual, your post was written in
something otherwise intended to approximate English (and quite possibly
approximating it more closely than I often do). If you wrote a Fortran
OPEN statement, then I would not have criticized it. My personal style
makes the access explicit instead of depending on the default, but I
would not have bothered to bring that up unless specifically questioned
on the matter or asked to show an example of how I might write
something.

Even in specific Fortran terms, you will find, for example, that when
the Fortran standard says "unformatted", it means exactly that. That's
because the Fortran standard, like most usenet posts, is written in
English (well, there are some translated versions, but none of them are
in Fortran). If you find somewhere (and I doubt that you will) where the
Fortran standard says "unformatted" to imply "sequential unformatted",
then please submit a discrepancy report because that would be an error
in the standard unless there was introductory text to explain that the
discussion applied only to sequential files.

More particularly, the reason I replied was not so much to pick nits as
to correct mistaken impressions that such (English) statements are
likely to cause. Regardless of what you might have meant, or why saying
just "unformatted" might tend to make you automatically think
"sequential unformatted", when you say "unformatted" in an (English)
sentence, at least some of the readers are likely to think that you mean
what you say. In this particular case, that would mislead them into
thinking that what you said would apply to stream unformatted. That
would be quite unfortunate because it would direct them away from the
best current approach to some quite common situations. It is to those
readers more than to you that I aim my correction.

For that reason, as long as you (or others) keep saying just
"unformatted" when you are talking about things that apply only to
sequential unformatted, I will continue to post corrections so as to
correct the mistaken impression it can make on readers. I'm really quite
knee-jerky about it - intentionally so. If the frequency of this
particular misusage goes down as a result, then I'll feel the need to
post corrections less often.

--
Richard Maine | Good judgment comes from experience;
email: last name at domain . net | experience comes from bad judgment.
domain: summertriangle | -- Mark Twain
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