From owner-freebsd-hackers  Wed Oct 15 02:38:03 1997
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Date: Wed, 15 Oct 1997 12:37:25 +0300 (EEST)
From: Andrew Stesin <stesin@gu.net>
Reply-To: stesin@gu.net
To: Mike Smith <mike@smith.net.au>
cc: hackers@FreeBSD.ORG
Subject: Re: Call for Fortran assistance.
In-Reply-To: <199710150751.RAA02149@word.smith.net.au>
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On Wed, 15 Oct 1997, Mike Smith wrote:

> Our second design threw the data through a FIFO, but Fortran has funny 
> formatting requirements for sequential-access data that have stymied us.

	What was so strange there with the formatting?

> We tried converting to ASCII and then parsing it back in, but that's 
> too slow.

	As far as I recall, Fortran is able to handle "binary"
	input records (in a way like one do read(2)/write(2)
	of a memory buffer containig a C struct foo { ... };
	or some kind of an array)
	without a formatting and conversion overhead.  But that
	was some 10-12 years ago I was doing this daily, so
	my memory may serve me wrong (?)  Anyway you will be
	able to fill a Fortran array with bytes from an input
	stream without any conversion and use the buffer' content
	in any way you like then, using Fortran' equivalent
	of C union xxx { ... };  that is a COMMON construct.

> We've offered to write a Fortran-callable C procedure that can manage 
> reading the FIFO, but they don't use procedures much (!) and want an 
> all-fortran solution.

	Oh damn...

Best regards,
Andrew Stesin

nic-hdl: ST73-RIPE