Yes, that could cause various nasty behaviours. I feel inclined to write a debugging anecdote of mine. First, I spotted that the program does something wrong in routine called Validate:
integer function Validate(iValid)
which was called as:
j = Validate(VALID_TOPOLOGY)
The argument is declared as:
integer, parameter:: VALID_TOPOLOGY = 1
When I inspected value of iValid argument in the debugger, it was 47, which was meaningless. Hmmm, strange. I had to insert a "sanity check" line immediately before the call:
idummy = VALID_TOPOLOGY
I rebuilt the application, and checked value of idummy in the debugger. It was 1 as expected. However, value of iValid was still 47. Have you seen "A Beautiful Mind?" :-)
(...an hour later)
The source of the problem lied in the call few dozen lines before the crazy one. Another routine was called like
call e_sin_ostrva(ierror,1)
It actually changed the value of constant "1" to 47. Compiler saw that the constant with value 1 was used twice as argument in the same routine (once as literal, once as PARAMETER), so it decided to reuse the same memory location, thus VALID_TOPOLOGY become 47. But then, how didn't it show in my "sanity check" line? Simply, compiler saw that I'm assigning a constant to a variable so it didn't bother to actually do the copying from one memory location to another; instead, it just translated the line as j=1.
Jugoslav
