(j3.2006) ASSOCIATED

[Van Snyder]

On Tue Mar 9 17:31:59 EST 2010 Robert Corbett Robert.Corbett at Sun.COM
wrote:

        In the description of the intrinsic function ASSOCIATED
        [13.7.13, 304-305], the word absent clearly means omitted.

ASSOCIATED works just fine if "absent" means "not present" in the sense
defined by ordinary English usage and subclause 12.5.2.12 because TARGET
is not defined to be a pointer dummy argument.  To me, that that means
it's not a pointer dummy argument.  Since it's optional, if its
associated actual argument is disassociated, that means the dummy
argument is not present, and the rest of the description works.  This
didn't work in F90, F95 or F03.

There is a bit of redundancy because if TARGET is a disassociated
pointer, Cases (vi) and (vii) can't occur.  But that's not really a
problem.

I thought we at one time specified 13.2.1 that the descriptions of
arguments of intrinsic functions describe requirements on the actual
arguments, rather than describing the dummy arguments -- but I can't
find it now.  If we do say this somewhere, we need to take extra care
with ASSOCIATED to say that its POINTER argument is a POINTER dummy
argument; otherwise we have to add that its pointer association status
can be disassociated, to avoid the requirement that pointers associated
with nonpointer nonoptional dummy arguments have to be associated with a
target.

ALLOCATED has similar problems, mutatis mutandis.