From owner-sc22wg5+sc22wg5-dom8=www.open-std.org@open-std.org Thu Mar 15 09:18:03 2012 Return-Path: X-Original-To: sc22wg5-dom8 Delivered-To: sc22wg5-dom8@www.open-std.org Received: by www.open-std.org (Postfix, from userid 521) id 447C79DB118; Thu, 15 Mar 2012 09:18:03 +0100 (CET) Delivered-To: sc22wg5@open-std.org Received: from ppsw-41.csi.cam.ac.uk (ppsw-41.csi.cam.ac.uk [131.111.8.141]) by www.open-std.org (Postfix) with ESMTP id 0592F9DB112 for ; Thu, 15 Mar 2012 09:18:01 +0100 (CET) X-Cam-AntiVirus: no malware found X-Cam-SpamDetails: not scanned X-Cam-ScannerInfo: http://www.cam.ac.uk/cs/email/scanner/ Received: from hermes-2.csi.cam.ac.uk ([131.111.8.54]:56595) by ppsw-41.csi.cam.ac.uk (smtp.hermes.cam.ac.uk [131.111.8.156]:25) with esmtpa (EXTERNAL:nmm1) id 1S85sl-0000Pd-SS (Exim 4.72) (return-path ); Thu, 15 Mar 2012 08:17:59 +0000 Received: from prayer by hermes-2.csi.cam.ac.uk (hermes.cam.ac.uk) with local (PRAYER:nmm1) id 1S85sl-0001dZ-PS (Exim 4.67) (return-path ); Thu, 15 Mar 2012 08:17:59 +0000 Received: from [83.67.89.123] by webmail.hermes.cam.ac.uk with HTTP (Prayer-1.3.4); 15 Mar 2012 08:17:59 +0000 Date: 15 Mar 2012 08:17:59 +0000 From: "N.M. Maclaren" To: Malcolm Cohen Cc: WG5 , rabenseifner@hlrs.de Subject: Re: [ukfortran] (SC22WG5.4649) AW: Vote on N1904 Message-ID: In-Reply-To: <20120315010351.255249DB118@www.open-std.org> References: <20120312152923.857DB9DB112@www.open-std.org><20120314164259.A5DD4356A46@www.open-std.org><20120314215009.D830F9DB112@www.open-std.org> <20120314225736.EE474356A42@www.open-std.org> <20120315010351.255249DB118@www.open-std.org> X-Mailer: Prayer v1.3.4 Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; format=flowed; charset=ISO-8859-1 Sender: owner-sc22wg5@open-std.org Precedence: bulk On Mar 15 2012, Malcolm Cohen wrote: > >>It was that MPI receive buffers are a well-known example of where >>output-only assumed-type arguments are needed. While there is no >>difficulty in using INTENT(INOUT) or no INTENT, having to specify >>something other than what you intend is poor software engineering. > > I agree, but we intend TYPE(*) to be poorly engineered in any case (see > much lower down re void*). Agreed. >Bill Long wrote: >> I agree it is overkill, but for such a narrowly focused feature as >> TYPE(*), I think that is an acceptable trade-off. > > Contrariwise, I think the big hammer is the smallest reasonable change > that is consistent with our "void *" intent. If we ever want to ease the > restriction, we probably need to drop the "void *" idea... I can see that I don't have much support :-) However, I do think that a very short NOTE summarising your arguments would help poor, naive C programmers who might mistakenly get the impression that Fortran doesn't support output-only assumed-type arguments. That would be easy to write. Regards, Nick Maclaren.