Talk:Hollerith constant

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Untitled[edit]

Am I the only one bothered by the lack of carriage control in the FORMAT examples? Maybe the spec says that 1HH becomes 2H H (I have no idea, we always just Did It Right) but it seems like an example ought to be 100% correct. My FORTRAN is too rusty for me to sail in and hack up the page w/o asking for input though. Also the examples all assume that unit 6 is assigned to something useful, which isn't always true (it's probably the most popular default printer device but again I'm not so sure that's in the spec). 24.62.205.183 (talk) 03:57, 5 October 2008 (UTC)[reply]

You bring up a good point. But I think it is secondary to what Hollerith constants were. When I wrote the original article, I was thinking of them more in terms of their role as the predecessor to CHARACTER data type. Perhaps an additional article on carriage control should be written?

As far as standards go, prior to Fortran 2003, the various Fortran Standard documents did contain some reference to carraige control characters in col 1 of formatted outputs. It made no sense for interactive I/O. And few printers made since the early 1980s honor carraige control characters anyway. So the text was removed from Fortran 2003.

As for unit 6, even though unit numbers are implementation-defined by the Standards (all of them), it is the defacto standard output unit number used by the Fortran community. F2003 parameterizes this, by including the parameter OUTPUT_UNIT in the ISO_FORTRAN_ENV intrinsic module. Wws (talk) 05:10, 9 October 2008 (UTC)[reply]

Hollerith symbol - single quote[edit]

With the change from the hollerith constant to a string, the single quote character that delimited strings was referred to by some IBMers (and others) as a hollerith - specifically the vertical single quote (') and not the "curly" single quote (′). I wonder if this should be mentioned in this article or elsewhere?

Do others recognize this use of the term "hollerith"? - a Google search suggests not. I learned it at McGill U. in the early '70s. --Michael Daly (talk) 23:30, 5 March 2009 (UTC)[reply]