[MPIWG Fortran] ticket 351

[N.M. Maclaren]

On Oct 22 2013, Bill Long wrote:
>
>2) I don't really see the point of this at all.  The user can just call 
>the native Fortran intrinsics directly.  Why should there be a duplicate 
>version that starts with MPI_ ?  I would suggest, instead, that you just 
>add a note in the spec (advice to users) point out that Fortran 
>programmers can access the command line arguments using the language 
>intrinsics.   Maybe someone can convince me this is not adequate, but 
>I've been using those intrinsics with parallel programs for some time 
>and they work just fine.

I assume that the desire for this is to support the systems which do not
use a mpiexec/mpirun command, but fire up MPI directly, as IBM poe does.

However, I have always felt that the original C approach was a horrible
hack, just as having C's argument list (and arguments) writable is.
There were good reasons at the time but, given that Fortran has done
without it with little to no trouble for so long, I agree with Bill.


Regards,
Nick Maclaren.