Additions to the repository

[Tim Tautges]

Carl Ollivier-Gooch wrote:

> 
> In the short term, definitely, because I'm not currently taking 
> advantage of the name bindings, so whatever the Fortran compiler 
> normally does happens with those names.  I did this because, for some 
> reason, gfortran 4.3.x doesn't support name bindings.  In the long run, 
> I think the usual preprocessor magic can be used to have the same effect.
> 
> In the longer run, I'll wonder aloud whether we shouldn't look to some 
> other solution for F77 compatibility.  For instance, commercial 
> compilers presumably support Fortran 2003 and 77 in the same executable, 
> so the cost to applications of compiling routines that access iMesh 
> using the F2003 capabilities may not be too painful.  Alternatively, the 
> wrappers to hide some of the ugliness that Fortran pushes on us (and fix 
> the name thing) would be very thin, much thinner than the wrappers we 
> all already have to convert iMesh calls to native database calls.
> 

Is there something about the current cpp-based name mangling that doesn't work in F2003, or just that there seems to be 
a more elegant mechanism in F2003 to handle C names?  If the latter, I for one don't have time to change gears this late 
in the game.  I also am skeptical about requiring F2003 for any f77 application.  The commercial compilers may have 
caught up, but what about those on the petascale machines?  Also, I'd assert that compatibility with gfortran buys us 
mindshare, which is almost as important.  Finally, if we open up the discussion about wrappers at this point, we could 
probably spend the next 6 months figuring out the right solution, and another year before all the implementations catch 
up.  I think the time would be better spent implementing the parts of our current spec which nobody has implemented yet.

- tim

> Carl
> 

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              Tim Tautges            Argonne National Laboratory
          (tautges at mcs.anl.gov)      (telecommuting from UW-Madison)
          phone: (608) 263-8485      1500 Engineering Dr.
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