Re: [PATCH, Fortran] pad char to int conversions with spaces instead of zeros (legacy)

[Jerry DeLisle <jvdelisle@charter.net>]

On 12/4/18 9:04 AM, Fritz Reese wrote:
> On Tue, Dec 4, 2018 at 10:12 AM Jakub Jelinek <jakub@redhat.com> wrote:
>>
>> Just a couple of random comments.
>> -fdec-pad-with-spaces option name doesn't look right, because it doesn't say
>> what the option affects.  So perhaps have transfer in the option name?
> [...]
>> Wouldn't it be better to allow specifying whatever character you want to pad
>> with, so that users can choose something even different?
> 
> I concur with this. In that case some option like -ftransfer-pad-char=
> may be a more appriopriate name, where -fdec may enable a default
> transfer-pad-char of \x20 rather than \x00.

I disagree completely. I assume the idea of -fdec-pad-with-spaces is to 
accomodate some old dec fortran code. The only reason to use some other 
character is if someone is writing new dec fortran code, which is 
implying encouraging people to be writing non standard conforming code.

Even if it is conforming in the sense that it is processor dependent you 
are encouraging people to create new non portable code across compilers. 
Please just stay consistent with Intel.

This whole padding business just stinks to me. There are better ways to 
accomplish these results without using transfer to convert ascii strings 
into bit patterns or whatever the heck some programmer is trying to do 
here, like maybe use 'ABCE     ' if thats what is really needed. And, 
please everyone please quit fiddling with the compiler to fix problems 
in the source code. Are people so lazy or such cheapskates they won't do 
this the right way and update the damn source code if it needs to be used.

We have truly more serious and real problems/bugs in gfortran that 
people should be spending the scarce resources on and not this junk.

Jerry