Re: The joy of FORTRAN

On Mon, 30 Sep 2024 12:35:48 -0000 (UTC), Waldek Hebisch wrote:

In my world blank padding is simply wrong result.  Truncation too.

Agree about blank padding -- PL/I had VARYING strings which allowed for
explicit lengths. But there was still a maximum length, so what happens if
you would exceed that? You have to truncate (or perhaps raise an error).
The only proper solution is fully dynamically-allocated strings, à la
BASIC, Perl, Python etc.