On Fri, 5 May 2000, John Bray wrote:
> As a user, the whole pointer system in F90 has been nasty for years. The
> different requirements for dynamic allocation, aliases and genuine pointers
> were combined in F90 in a way that still confuses me.
[and]
> I look forward to F2000 when I can change all my POINTER attributes to the
> ALLOCATABLE ones I originally wanted, and restrict my POINTER use to the
> small sections of the code where the alias properties are useful.
I quite agree. I apologise if I haven't been keeping up at the back, but
I'm still slightly confused about what F2002 is going to bring us. At
present (in F95) there are three main circumstances in which you need to
use pointers:
1. When you _really_ want a pointer, e.g. for a linked-list.
2. When you want an allocatable component of a derived type.
3. When you want to hand an array over as an actual arg to return filled
but don't know how many values will be returned so you can't allocate
it in advance.
F2002 solves (2), does it also solve (3)?
--
Clive Page,
Dept of Physics & Astronomy,
University of Leicester.
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