Node: Suppressing Space Padding, Next: Fortran Preprocessor, Previous: AUTOMATIC Statement, Up: Missing Features
g77 should offer VXT-Fortran-style suppression of virtual
spaces at the end of a source line
if an appropriate command-line option is specified.
This affects cases where a character constant is continued onto the next line in a fixed-form source file, as in the following example:
10 PRINT *,'HOW MANY
1 SPACES?'
g77, and many other compilers, virtually extend
the continued line through column 72 with spaces that become part
of the character constant, but Digital Fortran normally didn't,
leaving only one space between MANY and SPACES?
in the output of the above statement.
Fairly recently, at least one version of Digital Fortran
was enhanced to provide the other behavior when a
command-line option is specified, apparently due to demand
from readers of the USENET group comp.lang.fortran
to offer conformance to this widespread practice in the
industry.
g77 should return the favor by offering conformance
to Digital's approach to handling the above example.