SUMMARY of Fortran Binary Standard Output replies

[Andy Clews]

A short time ago I posted a question about sending unformatted or binary
output to the standard output channel of a Fortran program; the
principal requirement being to pipe the output over a network.

Quite a number of people sent me ideas and a summary of most of them
appears below. I regret that I have lost some of the replies, but Thank You
to all those who took the trouble to email me.

>From James C Burley <burley at world.std.com>

If computing power is the issue, rewriting (especially transforming)
into C certainly wouldn't be a good answer even if it were easy.

If the program source is available and the program can be rebuilt,
perhaps a solution would be to use a different unit number (say 7)
and, at the beginning of the program, use OPEN(UNIT=7,FILE='filename',
FORM='UNFORMATTED') (I'm not sure about the FORM= offhand; look it up
to make sure).

I'm assuming that you can come up with a name for filename that either
explicitly says "write me to system A" via a UNIX pathname or that
specifies some kind of mappable connection.  I'm not a UNIX person
(yet) so I can't say for sure, but very likely OPEN can solve the
problems.

>From Peter Montgomery <pmontgom at math.ucla.edu>

	If your compiler supports the A format on non-character
data, then try using it (e.g., write each real*4 using an A4 format).
This may or may not work (e.g., when reading, there may be data
erroneously interpreted as end of line).  

	Also check the documentation for OPEN on your system.

	In any case, be sure your data types have identical binary 
representations on the sending and receiving machines.

>From dd horsfall x-4622 <ddh at hare.udev.cdc.com>

I suggest checking to see if your compiler preconnects (internal OPENs) a 
few files for you.  Probably, the run-time-library has done you this favor,
and pre-opened certain unit numbers ( some
use 5,6, and 0 for stdin, stdout, and stderr, respectively), and the mode
would be 'FORMATTED' by default.  Without knowing details of your 
particular implementation, it is likely that "all you gotta do is" CLOSE
and re-OPEN the file, specifying FORM='UNFORMATTED'.

>From David Levine <levine at crimee.ics.uci.edu>
Message-Id:  <9007190931.aa13429 at PARIS.ICS.UCI.EDU>
Sender: levine%edu.uci.ics.crimee at paris.ics.uci.edu
Status: RO

> I wonder if one could open "/dev/tty" (which automatically refers to your
> login terminal) as a file - that would mean you wouldn't need to keep

Yes, that should work!

>From Larry Jones <scjones%sdrc%thor at uunet.uu.net>

> shame it doesn't seem possible. Rewriting in C is out of the question,
> so I am told (existing Fortran program has about 1600 lines of code).

One possibility would be to use f2c to automatically translate
the fortran into c:

Archive-name: f2c/03-Feb-90
Original-posting-by: mwm at a.gp.cs.cmu.edu (Mark Maimone)
Original-subject: Re: free fortran to C translator
Archive-site: research.att.com [192.20.225.2]
Archive-directory: dist/f2c
Reposted-by: emv at math.lsa.umich.edu (Edward Vielmetti)


	Source for f2c, the Fortran to C translator introduced a few days
ago, is now available via both anonymous FTP and email.  To find out about
getting the source via email, send this message to netlib at research.att.com
(or UUCP address research!netlib)

		send index from f2c

To get it using anonymous FTP,   ftp research.att.com   and   cd   to
directory   dist/f2c.   All files are stored in compressed format, you will
need to uncompress(1) them on your system.

>From karish%mindcrf at ames.arc.nasa.gov

>Rewriting in C is out of the question,
>so I am told (existing Fortran program has about 1600 lines of code).

How about rewriting to the extent of changing write(*) to
vwrite(<arguments>), and linking against a variable-argument-list
C function that spits out the data?



-- 
Andy Clews, Computing Service, Univ. of Sussex, Brighton BN1 9QN, England
JANET: andy at syma.sussex.ac.uk   BITNET: andy%syma.sussex.ac.uk at uk.ac