From owner-sc22wg5  Thu Aug  9 10:37:20 2001
Received: from nameserv.rl.ac.uk (nameserv.rl.ac.uk [130.246.135.129])
	by dkuug.dk (8.9.2/8.9.2) with ESMTP id KAA81863
	for <SC22WG5@dkuug.dk>; Thu, 9 Aug 2001 10:37:20 +0200 (CEST)
	(envelope-from jkr@jkr.cc.rl.ac.uk)
Received: from jkr.cc.rl.ac.uk (jkr.cc.rl.ac.uk [130.246.8.20])
	by nameserv.rl.ac.uk (8.8.8/8.8.8) with ESMTP id JAA11021
	for <SC22WG5@dkuug.dk>; Thu, 9 Aug 2001 09:37:19 +0100
Received: (from jkr@localhost)
	by jkr.cc.rl.ac.uk (8.8.8+Sun/8.8.8) id JAA29259
	for SC22WG5@dkuug.dk; Thu, 9 Aug 2001 09:39:31 +0100 (BST)
Date: Thu, 9 Aug 2001 09:39:31 +0100 (BST)
From: John Reid <jkr@rl.ac.uk>
Message-Id: <200108090839.JAA29259@jkr.cc.rl.ac.uk>
To: SC22WG5@dkuug.dk
Subject: Re: (SC22WG5.2165) Named Scratch Files in Fortran 2000 - Rationale
MIME-Version: 1.0
Content-Type: text/plain; charset="us-ascii"

WG5,

To stop spam, any message that is not from a member of the WG5 list is
forwarded to me. If it is genuine, I ask David to add the sender to the
list and forward it to you. So far, I have done this without changing
the message. In this case, however, I have changed 'John Reid wrote' to
'Craig Dedo wrote'.

John. 


----- Begin Included Message -----

From keith.bierman@sun.com Wed Aug  8 19:52 BST 2001
Sender: khb@holosuite.Eng.Sun.COM
Date: Wed, 08 Aug 2001 11:49:53 -0700
From: keith bierman <keith.bierman@sun.com>
Reply-To: Keith.Bierman@sun.com
Organization: SunMicrosystems Laboratories
X-Mailer: Mozilla 4.77 [en] (X11; U; SunOS 5.7 sun4u)
X-Accept-Language: en,pdf
MIME-Version: 1.0
To: John Reid <jkr@rl.ac.uk>
CC: SC22WG5@dkuug.dk
Subject: Re: (SC22WG5.2165) Named Scratch Files in Fortran 2000 - Rationale
Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit

Craig Dedo wrote:
> 
> -
>     Here is a copy of the Rationale from both papers.
> [Begin Rationale]
> Rationale
>     Currently, the Fortran standard does not allow the user to name
> scratch files.  Not allowing the user to name scratch files is an
> unnecessary irregularity.  A named scratch file would be the only kind
> of named file which would be automatically deleted when the file is
> closed or execution terminates.
> 
>     Allowing Fortran programmers to give names to scratch files would
> have several advantages.  These advantages include:
1) > *   This feature would allow the programmer to protect against
> accidentally overwriting existing files.  This could happen if the
> processor generates a file name which is the same as the name of an
> existing file.
2) > *   This feature would allow the programmer to specify a
location for
> the scratch file which has enough space for the scratch file's contents.
> 
3) > *   The programmer could look at a scratch file's contents
during
> execution.
> 
>     If the processor does not delete scratch files if the program
> crashes, this feature would allow the programmer to do some post-mortem
> analysis.
> [End of Rationale]
> 

For whatever it is worth, I would note that (1) doesn't seem very
compelling (why can't the processor be expected to always generate a
unique name?). (2) however, can be quite useful. In my experience
more for performance than for the size (viz. being able to control
if scratch files are memory resident (virtual files), real files on
local storage, or real storage on the network ....

Personally, I have found such facilities to be useful in the past.


----- End Included Message -----