http://gcc.gnu.org/bugzilla/show_bug.cgi?id=54679
--- Comment #1 from Nick Maclaren <nmm1 at cam dot ac.uk> 2012-09-23 12:19:00 UTC --- Please reduce the severity to trivial, and change it to "Confusing diagnostic"! It's my error, at root, but gfortran could do better. I had forgotten the relevant constraint (C1006 in Fortran 2003). However, the syntax rule R1005 on the same page specifies that a width is mandatory for the L descriptor, so the actual error is that a width of zero is erroneous.