(j3.2006) (SC22WG5.3800) [ukfortran] Ballot on the technical content of the TR

[Aleksandar Donev]

On Tuesday 09 December 2008 10:53, N.M. Maclaren wrote:

> That says WHAT it intends to do, but not WHY those facilities are not
> needed but not (say) the ability to interoperate with derived types
> containing allocatable components.
Because:
1) No one proposed that and WG5 did not vote on it
2) It was proposed, and people thought it important, to provide C 
mechanisms to call Fortran procedures with assumed-shape, pointer, and 
allocatable arrays of interoperable type. WG5 voted on it "yes"
3) You were not there (I am serious).

If you believe "the ability to interoperate with derived types 
containing allocatable components" is essential that is fine, propose 
it and WG5 will vote.

Perhaps your issues are mostly with assumed-rank and assumed-type 
dummies? These were added to the TR mandate later, because:
1) It was seen as a major hole in interop (easy-to-use/safe interop with 
void* arguments) and inclusion in the TR was thus seen as a good idea 
(you can vote against it)
2) Descriptors provide a way to pass such dummies since they contain 
both some type and rank information, that C can then extract and use.

Best,
Aleks