From J.L.Schonfelder@liverpool.ac.uk Wed Mar 29 20:07:59 1995 Received: from mailhub.liverpool.ac.uk (mail.liv.ac.uk) by dkuug.dk with SMTP id AA05017 (5.65c8/IDA-1.4.4j for ); Wed, 29 Mar 1995 22:10:19 +0200 Received: from pop.liv.ac.uk by mail.liv.ac.uk with SMTP (PP); Wed, 29 Mar 1995 21:09:59 +0100 Date: Wed, 29 Mar 1995 20:07:59 GMT From: Lawrie Schonfelder Subject: Re: (SC22WG5.776) RE: Pointers to procedures To: Linda O'Gara Cc: comp-fortran-90@mailbase.ac.uk, SC22WG5@dkuug.dk Message-Id: Priority: Normal Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: TEXT/PLAIN; CHARSET=US-ASCII X-Charset: ASCII X-Char-Esc: 29 On Tue, 28 Mar 95 09:55:40 PST Linda O'Gara wrote: > Now me on a soapbox: > It has become more and more apparent to me that the users of Fortran > use it to get their jobs, science and engineering, done. They need a > functional tool to get their jobs done. Functional! If I need to > pound some nails, I go to my toolbox in the basement and grope around > for my hammer. If the handle happens to have a couple of ugly bumps on > it, I don't care as long as I can use it to pound the nails. And, if > the bumps don't prevent me from turning the hammer around and using it > remove the nails I pounded crookedly, hallelujah! To restate the > obvious, we can add wart-y language features to Fortran as long as we > don't compromise the functionality. I too have a soap box. I am all in favour of functionality but I will accept warts only after a lot of convincing that warts are essential to getting the functionality. My observation over many years is that warts are usually a symptom that a half solution is involved, ad hoc addition of an easy fix for a particular problem but which restricts full functionality. A non warty regular language design usually solves the specific problem and many others as well. Ultimately warty design makes for a difficult language to learn use and implement. Fortran pointers are not conceptually simply addresses (implementations might some time simply use machine addresses but that is not how the programmer model should see them). This is why I think we should not try to introduce pointers to procs as simply addresses a la C. Interoperability might just map Fortran procedure variables to C pointers to procs but that should be an implementation choice not a language design. -- Dr.J.L.Schonfelder Director, Computing Services Department, The University of Liverpool, UK Phone: +44 (151) 794-3716 Fax: +44 (151) 794-3759