FORTRAN V

IBM never defined a language called FORTRAN V, or provided a compiler for it, but some of its competitors used the term for their extended versions of FORTRAN. Univac and Data General are two companies that sold compilers for a language which they called FORTRAN V.

In general, FORTRAN V compilers included the CHARACTER data type as a standard feature of the language, and they added the ENCODE and DECODE statements as well. These statements allowed a character variable to be used instead of an input-output device as the source for a formatted read, or the target of a formatted write, and they looked like this:

      CHARACTER*80 BUFFER
...
      ENCODE(80,11,BUFFER),X,Y,Z
...
      DECODE(80,10,BUFFER),P,Q,R
...
      STOP
   10 FORMAT (3F12.5)
   11 FORMAT (3F12.5)
      END

Copyright (c) 2007 John J. G. Savard