Open Watcom FORTRAN 77 Language Reference

Language Reference
2.11 CHARACTER Statement
The CHARACTER statement is a type declaration statement and can be used to declare a name to be of type
character. The implicit type of the name, whether defined by the "first letter rule" (see the chapter entitled
"Names, Data Types and Constants" on page 151) or by an IMPLICIT statement, is either confirmed or
overridden. However, once a name has been declared to be of type character, it cannot appear in another
type declaration statement.
There are various forms of the CHARACTER statement. The following sections describe them.
2.11.1 Standard CHARACTER Statement
CHARACTER[*len [,]] name [,name] ...
where:
name
is one of the following forms:
v[*len]
a(d)[*len]
a[*len](d)
v
a
(d)
len
is a variable name, symbolic name of a constant, function name or dummy procedure name.
is an array name.
is that part of the array declarator defining the dimensions of the array.
is called the length specification and is the length (number of characters) of a character variable,
character array element, symbolic character constant or character function. It has one of the
following forms:
(1) An unsigned positive integer constant.
(2) A positive integer constant expression enclosed in parentheses.
(3) An asterisk in parentheses (*).
The length specification immediately following the word CHARACTER is the length specification for each
entity in the statement not having its own length specification. If omitted, the default is 1. An entity with
its own length specification overrides the default length specification or the length specification
immediately following the word CHARACTER. Note that for an array the length specification applies to
each element of the array.
26 CHARACTER Statement