Is this a Standard ?

I got a reading error while filling real*4 variables with these numbers which led me to this text line in the data file

 1.8000E-02  7.0438E+00 -8.4720+220

Notice the number without E or D ? Kind of I did not pay attention before to this but is this standard way of writing real*8 numbers ?

The only reason to get an error in reading the data that you showed is that the third item has an exponent that is too large for a REAL*4 variable. The standard specifies (look up the section for Fw.d input) that the start of the exponent field may contain an 'e', 'd', 'E', 'D', '+' or '-' .

You may not like leaving out the E/D, and you can certainly make sure that your input data contains the E/D, but the standard does not require it.

The justification? You have to think in terms of punched card input, where being able to leave out the E/D could reduce your card budget by 10 percent.

Thanks Mecej4. This is the case when I can definitely live with it if this is a Standard. This behavior of the code is reasonable when the compiler detects an error and that definitely is very useful warning i should not miss. I ignored these errors in this place before and when the code with time became too large and complex and buggy I now pay for that by loosing a lot of time with any small error. Lost one more Saturday, which became like a doom to me lately, I loose now most of Saturdays on some 'errors from the hell' (the ones I never had before or the ones hard to find.... I wrote about this devilry effect before) 😦 .

Dan,

According to the Fortran standard, I think the value '-8.4720+22' is a valid number, although I would consider this an error.

John

John, I just noticed that that you wrote '-8.4720+22'; what Dan's data file had, however, was '-8.4720+220'. Without the third digit ('0') in the exponent field, the input number would have been well within the range of REAL, and no runtime error would have been issued.