The construction ‘@"abc"’ converts the enclosed string to its ASCII representation. For example, in C and C++ ‘@"abc"’ will be output as ‘"\141\142\143"’.
In FORTRAN and RATFOR, no such simple mechanism exists in the
language, so a function call is issued. For example, the previous
example would be output as ‘ASCIIstr('abc')’. The user is
responsible for defining the function ‘ASCIIstr’. The name of this
function can be changed by the style-file entry ‘ASCII_fcn’.
See ASCII_Fcn
.
If the native character set of one’s machine is ASCII, the conversion will not be done unless the ‘-A’ command-line option is used. See ‘-A’: Turn on ASCII translations.