Date   : Wed, 15 Oct 1986 12:31:08 EAS
From   : "John S. Fisher" <FISHER%RPICICGE.BITNET@wiscvm.ARPA>
Subject: Microsoft's FORTRAN product

I, too, have found the Microsoft's FORTRAN compiler very limited in its
ability to cope with INTEGER*4 values.  Add and subtract seem to work
and division by an INTEGER*2....  Call a built-in function like MIN0
or MOD--don't bother.

I have been more frustrated by its incompleteness in the I/O area.
Create a data file with the editor; save it on disk.  Now, try to read
it with a FORTRAN program.  Every input record except the first has an
extraneous line-feed for its first byte.  However, if your first format
item is a numeric, the I/O support quitely strips the line-feed!  Ask
for character data first, and you get the bogus line-feed.  On the
other hand, if you write formated data to a disk file and then try to
type or edit the result, it's one long line since no line-feeds got
inserted after each carriage return.

My final solution to the disk I/O problem was to modify the disk I/O
driver provided in source by Microsoft.  My change was simply to
insert linefeeds along with the carriage return at end-of-record
during formated disk writes, and to skip linefeeds during formated
disk reads.  Not perfect, but the behavior is much more reasonable
now.