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I process lots of output from Fortran programs, and it generally appears that the output from these programs has a leading space, i.e., character column 1 is blank. Consider a short program leading.f:
program leading
print *, "<-- What's that space for?"
end program leading
Has the output
<-- What's that space for?
(yes, there is one space character at the beginning). My question is contained in the program.
Back in the dinosaur era, when FORTRAN output usually went to a green-bar impact printer, certain characters in the first print column were often interpreted as control codes (line feeds, form feeds, etc). Many programmers learned to explicitly blank column 1 of their output, unless some special effect was intended — and old habits die hard!