The Fortran standard states that when you have list directed input, and a forward slash (/) appears at the end of a line of input, that any variables in the read statement that have not been initialized should simply be skipped over (ignored).
When gfortran encounters a slash at the beginning of a line, it does not exhibit the correct behavior. For example, this data: 6.34 1.34 4345.34534 / with this read statement read(50, *)r1,r2,r3,r4 should set r1 to 6.34, r2 to 1.34, r3 to 4345.34534, and leave r4 unchanged. But gfortran code issues the following run time error: Fortran runtime error: Bad real number in item 4 of list input All other fortran compilers that I use (xlf, ifort, etc) handle this case correctly. -- Summary: Slash at end of input not recognized according to standard Product: gcc Version: 4.3.0 Status: UNCONFIRMED Severity: normal Priority: P3 Component: fortran AssignedTo: unassigned at gcc dot gnu dot org ReportedBy: drewmccormack at mac dot com GCC build triplet: Configured with: ../gcc-4.3-20061223/configure --enable- language GCC host triplet: gcc version 4.3.0 20061223 (experimental) GCC target triplet: Target: powerpc-apple-darwin8.8.0 http://gcc.gnu.org/bugzilla/show_bug.cgi?id=30435