Mike_Z
Veteran Member
For the last few days I have been writing a DEC Fortran program on my PDP8e. The program asks for 3 lengths, checks if these lengths make a valid triangle, if so, then calc's it's area. I was using EDIT to enter source code. I found EDIT to work fine, but was a little tiring. I looked into TECO, but got confused. Then I tried to write the Fortran source code in CP/M2.2 WordStar and transfer it to the PDP8e via Kermit 80. For some reason I could not get Kermit 80 to work in both directions. So I tried writing the source code in SMART word processor on my IBM XT then transfer the code via KERMIT DOS. This worked in both directions. I was progressing until yesterday. Then for some reason I started to get compiler errors such as misspelled keyword and missing operands. I could not see any of these errors in my simple code. So I tried just removing the offending lines. This just moved the errors to other lines. The next thing I tried was to write a very simple source code and transfer it. The same problems occurred. I wrote the same program using DEC EDIT and there were no errors. This led me to believe that maybe KERMIT was changing something. This also was not the problem. Then it occurred to me that the Fortran IV source code is based on punch cards. The layout of the source code has to match code that would be punched onto cards. The problem was my SMART word processor. I had it set to produce a text file, but it's default setting was to use a 5 space left margin and 10 space tabs. Most times these setting were not a problem, until I started to use label numbers. The layout for these lines were 5 spaces then the label number. A punch card uses the first 5 columns for the label and the 6th column is the continuation character. My label line numbers were occurring in the continuation field. I found that any non space character in the continuation field is read a continuation. So my SMART text file was confusing Fortran. After resetting the margin and tab settings of SMART, I can now write source code in the IBM XT and transfer it to the PDP8e with no problems (at least for now). Now I can get back to error codes like undefined statements etal. Just thought you might be interested. Mike