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(g77-295.info)Character and Hollerith Constants

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Character and Hollerith Constants
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   To avoid the extensive hassle that would be needed to avoid this,
`f2c' uses C character constants to encode character and Hollerith
constants.  That means a constant like `'HELLO'' is translated to
`"hello"' in C, which further means that an extra null byte is present
at the end of the constant.  This null byte is superfluous.

   `g77' does not generate such null bytes.  This represents significant
savings of resources, such as on systems where `/dev/null' or
`/dev/zero' represent bottlenecks in the systems' performance, because
`g77' simply asks for fewer zeros from the operating system than `f2c'.
(Avoiding spurious use of zero bytes, each byte typically have eight
zero bits, also reduces the liabilities in case Microsoft's rumored
patent on the digits 0 and 1 is upheld.)