On Tue, 1 Sep 1998, James Giles wrote:
<SNIP>
> Consider some of the other features that (I hope) will be in the standard
> in about the same time-frame as you're talking about. The ability to
> explicitly declare that a MODULE procedure *must* be inlined (or that
> it must not be) should be in the standard by then. This means that, if
> you explicitly declare the access function to be INLINEd, there will
> definitely be no optimization advantages to the READONLY approach.
> In addition, there is occasional mention of cleaning up the syntax of
> function references. It would be a good idea if nullary functions (those
> with no arguments) that have an explicit interface be referenced by
> name only (without the need of an empty argument list). The empty
> parenthesis are only required now because of the ambiguity between
> an implicitly declared scalar and a function with implicit interface. It
> the symbol has been explicitly declared, such an ambiguity doesn't
> exist.
<SNIP>
While I agree with some of the implications of Jim's hopes I think
given the proposed F2000 standard his hopes are too high.
An INLINE attribute is essentially a compiler directive and Fortran
has no such attributes (yet, is VOLATILE a first?). So it is not clear
at all that such a keyword would easily make it.
Relying on compilers to implement inlines for all such cases is also
not necessarily a good bet. We have several Quality-of-Implementation
issues that are NOT implemented widely yet.
Secondly, the parentheses for argumentless functions won't go away
so quickly since it requires explicit type declarations for all
variables and procedures, in other words removal of the implicit
or explicit IMPLICIT statements. I would welcome this but it is
not mentioned among the obsolescent features in F2000. And Fortran
likes to give some warning ahead of time, quite reasonably so, what
will be deleted.
Given this and the widespread want for READONLY (or PROTECTED)
I think trying to get READONLY now is (much?) more realistic.
Cheers,
WWS
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