Comment (by Erik Schnetter):

Clever!

Character types are a bit magical in Fortran; they don’t really behave like strings in C. You could use logical*8 instead; assignments between integer/`real` and logical are also disallowed in Fortran.

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Ticket URL: https://bitbucket.org/einsteintoolkit/tickets/issues/2571/runtime-failure-due-to-useing-character-8