[MPIWG Fortran] MPI_STATUS_SIZE: Why only in Fortran?

[Jeff Squyres (jsquyres)]

Question: why is MPI_STATUS_SIZE only defined in Fortran?

MPI-3.1:2.5.4 p15:36 specifically states that MPI_STATUS_SIZE is only defined in Fortran.  Why isn't is also defined in C?

I ask because I was just writing a test for the MPI_Status conversion functions in Open MPI.  The test spans both Fortran and C.  But in order to test the MPI_Status_f2c / MPI_Status_c2f functions (which are only defined in C, mind you), I wanted to make a stack-allocated array of MPI_Fint's for the INTEGER-array-style Fortran status.  ...but I couldn't, because MPI_STATUS_SIZE isn't defined in C.  Indeed, there's no mechanism in C for knowing how long an INTEGER-style Fortran status array needs to be -- even though we have functions in C for dealing with INTEGER-style Fortran statuses.

To be totally clear, you can't do this in C:

  MPI_Fint f_status[MPI_STATUS_SIZE];

Is this an oversight?  Shouldn't we define MPI_STATUS_SIZE in all languages?

Or, perhaps if there's possible confusion between MPI_STATUS_SIZE in C and sizeof(MPI_Status) (since they could actually be different values), perhaps we could call it MPI_FORTRAN_STATUS_SIZE in C?  (Or even MPI_FORTRAN_INTEGER_STATUS_SIZE to differentiate it from sizeof(TYPE(MPI_Status))?

Thoughts?

If we view this as an errata, I think there's still time to get an update in for MPI-4.

-- 
Jeff Squyres
jsquyres at cisco.com