On Jun 12 2014, Jeff Squyres (jsquyres) wrote:

Technically, a character and a logical have numerical values, but that's not how they're generally used.

Not in Fortran, they don't! There have been plenty of Fortrans where the latter didn't, and almost certainly some where the former didn't. The value returned from ICHAR is not required to be the 'value' of the datum, and certainly wasn't on systems with parity characters (assuming that any had Fortran 77 compilers). I can't remember if any System/370 compiler supported only the defined EBCDIC characters (before the 8 bit code page extensions), but that would be another example. Regards, Nick Maclaren.