This one was sufficiently 'obvious' that not only has it been committed to 9-branch but to 7- and 8-branches as well.
Although the choking gimplifier was a regression, the testcase never worked on any branch because resolve.c:deferred_op_assign should always have returned false for pointer expressions, since the reallocate on assign cannot be used. The part of the patch intrans-expr.c fixed the regression. Committed in revisions 269157, 269160 & 269163. Paul 2019-02-23 Paul Thomas <pa...@gcc.gnu.org> PR fortran/88117 * resolve.c (deferred_op_assign): Return if the lhs expression has the pointer attribute. * trans-expr.c (gfc_trans_assignment_1): Do not fix the string length if the lhs expression has the pointer attribute. 2019-02-23 Paul Thomas <pa...@gcc.gnu.org> PR fortran/88117 * gfortran.dg/deferred_character_32.f90 : New test