Swietanowski Artur said:
> Frankly speaking, both those arguments are easily made irrelevant. 
> Any run time overhead caused by initialization of static (esp. 
> constant) data has to be considered trivial when compared with 
> the task that the program performs. Therefore I wouldn't mind 

Currently both variables and PARAMETERs (i.e. named constants) are
initialised by the same class of expression - an initialisation
expression.

Thus you cannot put off evaluation until runtime (which has its own
overheads and nastiness anyway) because PARAMETER values can be used
to determine KIND numbers, and thus the types of variables etc.

Adding yet another class of expression ("super-initialisation expressions",
which can be used to initialise variables but not PARAMETERs) would be
an unnecessary complication and an irregularity to the language.

> And some initializations (possibly a majority in any program) 
> would still evaluate easily enough for the compiler to calculate 
> immediately.

Well, in my opinion they all evaluate easily enough, but others think
otherwise.

Cheers,
-- 
...........................Malcolm Cohen, NAG Ltd., Oxford, U.K.
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