[MPI3 Fortran] Results of recent J3 Fortran meeting

[Bill Long]

N.M. Maclaren wrote:
> On Oct 21 2010, Supalov, Alexander wrote:
> 
>> Multibyte characters are supported by MPI in some sense (see MPI_WCHAR). 
>> Not sure of the level of Fortran support, though- either desired or 
>> provided.
> 

Support for ISO-10646 characters is defined, but optional, in the 
Fortran standard. There might be some implementations that support them, 
but certainly others that do not.  In terms of interoperability with C, 
the only character-like object that is interoperable is the Fortran 
equivalent of C's char.  As far as I know, there have been no proposals 
for interoperability with wchar_t.

Cheers,
Bill



> I am not sure of the level of MPI support, either!  wchar_t was oppposed
> in both C90 and C99, for reasons I could describe.  C++ has a somewhat
> different and more useful specification, which may or may not be fully
> compatible.  And the next versions of the standards are introducing a
> completely new pair of extended character types and conversion functions
> for Unicode support - I believe that C++0X introduced them for compatibility
> with C1X, which may or may not ever become a standard!
> 
> God alone knows what MPI implementors make of that mess, because I have
> never touched the things, few scientists are interested, and I teach the
> kiddies to avoid that area like the plague.  I have heard rumours that
> some people use the facility, in non-portable applications.
> 
> Regards,
> Nick Maclaren.
> 
> 
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-- 
Bill Long                                           longb at cray.com
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