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> > To me, it seems that pointing to an object and having the size > > determined at run time are two such completely different concepts that > > I'm wondering why the former is used for the latter at all.... > > > > When the present kludges are no longer necessary, what about making them > > obsolete and then deleting them? Otherwise, they are bound to cause > > much more confusion than the FORTRAN IV stuff still kicking around. > > The present kludge of using pointers where you'd really prefer > allocatables is because of omissions in the language (namely the > omission of the ability to use allocatables in some important > contexts). Right. > I can't imagine what it is that you would be talking about > obsoleting. Using a pointer when you SHOULD be using an allocatable. :-) > Well, I suppose one could say that we are obsoleting the > omission. There are roles for pointers and there are roles for > allocatables. I would vehemently oppose deleting either. They should both remain, I was thinking about obsoleting certain USES of them (but thinking about it, don't know if that is practical or can even be done). GOTOs might still have their uses, but emulating IF blocks and DO loops is not one of them. > Perhaps you are talking about disallowing pointers to arrays. I > suppose that's my best guess about what you must mean. (Because I > really can't think of anything else you could mean). If so, I would > vehemently oppose that also. Doing so would involve major work to > provide suitable replacement functionality such as the current ability > to provide pointers to array slices. No, that should stay (I've even used this myself once). > Replacement functionality is not in the f2k plans. So you are > either talking about the next revision after f2k, Right. %%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%