On detecting misspelt identifiers in fortran

Abstract

An insidious mistake in Fortran is to misspell a symbolic name and thus inadvertently create a new variable. This short note shows how the IMPLICIT statement can be used to detect this mistake easily.

Letter to the editor

“…The self-evident conclusion of Hunter et al, 1 that stream output is more flexible and of more general application than formatted record output, is supported by an example which accounts for nearly half of the paper's ten pages. Unfortunately, this example is not one for which, in general, 'the use of conventional unit-record facilities leads to a the Editor combinatorial explosion' ; any Cobol programmer (using, of course, conventional unit-record facilities) would find the solution of the stated problem trivial in the extreme.…”