On Thursday, July 6, 2023 at 8:18:51 AM UTC-7, Farzad Tatar wrote:
> > And you can write in a way that your source is compatible with fixed and free form.
> > Comment a line with a "!" on the first column.
> > As a continuation character use an "&" on the sixth column (on the continued line as in fixed form)
> > and put a "&" after the 73th column in the first part of the continued line (like in the free form),
> > it will be taken as a comment in fixed form unless you are using a compiler option that increase
> > the length of a line beyond the 73th column (or it was the 72th column, I cannot remember).
> Thank you for the hints. However, the code was 6500, and doing all of these will take time.
It should be very easy to write a program to do the above.
As I noted, though, that only works if the program uses blanks in a way that satisfies free form.
Youcan'twriteeverythingtogetherwithoutblanks!
An dyo uca n'tad dthe minot therpla ces.
There are conversion programs designed to work with such code, but they are always
behind in the version of the standard that they support.
But pretty much no-one writes programs that way!
Well.
Some years ago, I was working with the MORTRAN 2 processor. It is written in standard
Fortran 66, with minimal extensions. That is, that you can assign and compare data read
in A format. (Yes, the standard doesn't allow for that.)
As well as I remember it, the program itself, and its output, has no extra blanks.
And even a comment something like:
"This program was written by another program. It is not meant to be understood by humans."
(Probably all upper case, though.)