[Mpi-forum] Fortran bindings

[Graham, Richard L.]

At the risk of upsetting the apple cart, I want to ask a question about the new proposed Fortran bindings for MPI 3.0.  I rather sure that the question I am about to ask has been addressed in the past, but to be honest, I did not understand the details of the proposal enough to note the difference.  It was not until the rather heated (and fruitful) discussions that occurred at the last meeting in Santorini, and a follow on discussion that this came up.

It seems to me that two options were considered with respect to these bindings:
  - Be able to use all three versions of the Fortran bindings within a single translation unit.  The goal being to make it possible to migrate incrementally to the new proposed bindings, within the applications current file structure.
  - Take advantage of the ability to have Fortran and C binding be exactly the same, bypassing a translation layer.

First, did I describe the two possibilities correctly ?  If so, why opt for the first over the second ?

Rich