(j3.2006) question about generic resolution

[Aleksandar Donev]

On 3/23/2010 7:02 PM, Malcolm Cohen wrote:

> Similar remarks suitably modified apply to the generic rule tweak too.
I am not sure this is right---perhaps you can be more explicit.

> That is certainly not my experience.  Even without CONTIGUOUS, I quite 
> frequently stumble across situations where there is a minor problem that 
> the "auto-targetting" feature would solve cleanly.  I have never 
> personally wanted to disambiguate between POINTER and ALLOCATABLE in a 
> generic
I have. So has Van. Both features are useful, but neither is 
indispensable or amazing on its own. Deciding which one to remove should 
not be taken lightly...in fact, removing things in general should not be 
seen as a favorable way of fixing last-minute bugs.

I recall TYPEDEF here. It was removed in haste at the last minute 
because of some problem, because the people in the subgroup dealing with 
that problem did not find it important enough and had ideas on how to do 
it better in some future never-to-appear standard. The typedef-like 
feature probably has more uses than any of the ones we are discussing now...

> As I wrote, the conflict is fundamental.  Our choices are limited to 
> effectively removing one or the other feature, or introducing a 
> "priority" scheme to disambiguate this case.
How about this option: The auto-targetting feature does not work with 
generic resolution, that is, the magic of pointing the dummy to the 
actual only happens if the call is non-generic. Otherwise, the actual 
must be a pointer. Or some variant thereof. I am not yet convinced the 
conflict is "fundamental".

Best,
Aleks

-- 
Aleksandar Donev, Ph.D.
Luis W. Alvarez Postdoctoral Fellow
Center for Computational Sciences and Engineering (https://ccse.lbl.gov)
Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (http://www.lbl.gov)
E-mail: adonev at lbl.gov
Phone: (510) 486-5782  Fax: (510) 486-6900
Address: MS 50A-1148, LBL, 1 Cyclotron Rd., Berkeley, CA 94720
Web: http://cims.nyu.edu/~donev/