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From: "robin" <robi...@bigpond.com>
Newsgroups: comp.lang.fortran,comp.lang.pl1
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Subject: Re: NAMELIST questions raised while testing it's use in parsing ?command line arguments
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Date: Wed, 02 Sep 2009 15:10:26 GMT
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"Peter Flass" <Peter_Fl...@Yahoo.com> wrote in message 
news:h7kd6d$j7s$1@news.eternal-september.org...
> glen herrmannsfeldt wrote:

>> Also, the PL/I EDIT directed output has some interesting difference
>> to Fortran FORMAT directed output.  Among others, it stops just
>> after the last list item has been used.  Like C printf, it is a
>> stream mode (non-advancing in Fortran terms), so it is easy to
>> generate complicated lines built up from many such statements.
>>
>> There isn't a form that allows interpreting a character string
>> as a format string, but otherwise the actual format description
>> is a little more powerful than in Fortran.
>
> I was sure there was at least one PL/I compiler that had a nonstandard 
> builtin that would encode a character string as a format, but I can't find 
> the reference just now.  At any rate, the combination of remote format 
> statements and expressions in the format specification allows just about 
> anything.

The fact that PL/I accepts expressions for the repeat factor, the width,
and the number of decimal places, etc, meant that it is unnecessary to
generate special formats a la Fortran.
Nevertheless, the EDIT built-in function permits formats to be built up
at run time, if required.