[MPI3 Fortran] Proposing changes to Fortran 2008

[Aleksandar Donev]

Hi,

Not to be argumentative, take this as IMO please.

On Friday 21 March 2008 05:13, Hubert Ritzdorf wrote:
> MPI and Fortran 77 have worked without any problems
Except for the problem that the MPI Forum chose to completely ignore and 
violate ALL existing Fortran standards. This *includes* Fortran 77. All 
Fortran versions are strictly typed and passing a REAL array to an INTEGER 
argument has never been, nor will it ever be legal.

> Thus, an attribute for an argument "Behave such as without interface
> description
Then don't supply an interface? Or simply say

VOID :: buffer 

for the actual just to give it a name. I already commented on this earlier.

> and don't perform copy-in/copy-out" 
What if the actual argument is a strided (non-contiguous) array or, say, an 
array constructor? The Fortran committee did not invent copy-in/copy-out 
because compilers wanted to do copy frivolously. It is a necessary 
implementation method to pass certain types of actuals to certain types of 
dummies. You have to explicitly address this and cannot just say "go back to 
Fortran 77". New Fortran has strided arrays, array constructors, array 
pointers, etc., etc., like it or not.

Best,
Aleks

-- 
Aleksandar Donev, Ph.D.
Lawrence Postdoctoral Fellow @ Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory
High Performance Computational Materials Science and Chemistry
E-mail: donev1 at llnl.gov
Phone: (925) 424-6816  Fax: (925) 423-0785
Address: P.O.Box 808, L-367, Livermore, CA 94551-9900
Web: http://cherrypit.princeton.edu/donev