Back to IVF Version 9.1.034

[Groundsel]

Hello,

I have recently encountered a problem with IVF 11.1.065 and, I believe it lives in earlier versions 11 and possibly 10. It has to do with reading a file. Our VB.Net software on an XP system seems to be terminating files which it generates with a SUB character ASCII CHAR(26). Our programs compiled with IVF used to treat this as an end of file. (Indeed,for a long time, I did not know that our software was writing a SUB characterand still do not really know why it appears.) Anyhow, some of our programs are now reading in this character and fouling up the interpretation of the read in image.

I am working on a long term fix for this which will more gracefully handle the SUB with the latest compiler. However, for the time being, I would like to get the older compiler back. I know that 9.1.034 will do the job and that our software will not challenge its modernity. However, we are now using Visual Studio 2005; not the VS 2003 we were using when 9.1.034 was current. And my attempts to install it keep running into trouble trying to install NetFramework 2.0.Do I need to uninstall something first (such as NetFramework 3.0) which arose in the subsequent compiler installations? Or is the attempt simply doomed to failure from the start (old IVF in relatively new VS)?

Cheers!
Tom Stevens

[Steven_L_Intel1]

What are you installing at the point where you get a complaint about .NET Framework? IVF doesn't try to install that on its own, and 9.1 did not include Visual Studio.

[mecej4]

It was in CP/M (and MSDOS V1 ?) that Ctrl-Z was used as an end-of-file marker. I know little about VB.Net, but this example did not write any Ctrl-Z to the file that it created using VBC V9.0:

[vb]Imports System.IO

Module Module1

    Sub Main()

        File.WriteAllText("test.txt", " Some characters.")

        Dim tFil As New FileInfo("test.txt")
        Dim length As Long = tFil.Length

        Console.WriteLine("New file length: {0}", length)
    End Sub

End Module
[/vb]

You mentioned reading images. Are you reading text files or binary files? If the latter, a single Ctrl-Z could not signify end-of-file.

In your position, I would track down the VB.net code that tacks on the Ctrl-Z and fix it, rather than undertake installing old versions of IFort, Visual Studio, etc.

I don't use VB.net or the VS IDE, and I have no problems despite having the multiple versions of .NET Framework: V1, V1.1, V2.0, V3.0, V3.5.

[Steven_L_Intel1]

Intel Fortran will treat a one-byte CTRL-Z as an ENDFILE record in an unformatted file.

[mecej4]

Interesting! However, OP stated that VB.NET is producing his files, so I guessed that he would be using either text files or using FORM='BINARY' on the Fortran side, rather than writing valid Fortran UNFORMATTED records inside VB.NET.

[Groundsel]

Hello,

My problem is solved. The SUB characters were being produced by Windows appends. The input to my Fortran programs were obtained by concatenating files created by the VB.Net program and a Windows script. That same script executes the Fortran programs.

While it is true that the older compilers used to deliver executables thattreatterminal SUBsas ends of file, the remedy was simply to have the script do its concatenating by using binary copy commands (COPY/B). Then theSUB is not created in the first place. So, that noted,my intention is to go back to the latest compilers available to me.

Thanks for your help, chaps. Sorry to have wasted your time.

Tom