I/O formatting occurs during data transfer
operations when data is converted between its machine-readable binary
representation and human-readable character format. Although unformatted
data transfers are faster because they do not incur the overhead
of data conversion, I/O formatting is useful for displaying
data in a human-readable form and for transferring data between
machines with different machine representations for a data type.
I/O formatting can be implicit or explicit. Implicit
formatting occurs during list-directed and namelist-directed I/O:
data is converted without programmer intervention, based on the
data types of the I/O list items; see “List-directed I/O” and “Namelist-directed I/O”. Explicit formatting
occurs under the control of the programmer, who specifies how the
data is to be converted.
This chapter describes explicit I/O formatting and
includes information about the following:
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