Re: [Plplot-devel] [ plplot-Bugs-3482164 ] Example plplot-5.9.9/examples/f95/x09f.f90 has wrong bounds

[Alan W. I. <ir...@be...>]

Hi Arjen (for the second time because I screwed up the plplot-devel
mailing list address on my first try so please don't reply to
that one):

Could you comment on this bug report on list (as well as the bug
tracker)?

Is it really a violation of Fortran standards if the LHS array bounds
are larger than the RHS array bounds?  I don't have much Fortran 95
experience, but I had assumed before reading this bug report that such
assignments would just fill in part of the LHS array corresponding to
the bounds of the RHS array and leave the rest of the LHS array
undefined, but the bug report refers to a URL which implies such bound
mismatches might lead to issues for some compilers.  Is that because
the compilers are at fault or are bounds mismatches a real violation
of the Fortran standards?

The other issue is that even if I am right and such assignments are
allowed, there may still be a bug because the underlying PLplot
library could potentially get the wrong size for the defined part of
the array.  If by chance we are accidentally avoiding that bug because
another array is used to set the array size processed by PLplot,
perhaps you should put in some array-size consistency checks into the
Fortran 95 bindings similar to what we have for all the swig-generated
bindings, and use that check to discover and eliminate all cases where
there are currently mismatches in array bounds.

Alan
__________________________
Alan W. Irwin

Astronomical research affiliation with Department of Physics and Astronomy,
University of Victoria (astrowww.phys.uvic.ca).

Programming affiliations with the FreeEOS equation-of-state
implementation for stellar interiors (freeeos.sf.net); the Time
Ephemerides project (timeephem.sf.net); PLplot scientific plotting
software package (plplot.sf.net); the libLASi project
(unifont.org/lasi); the Loads of Linux Links project (loll.sf.net);
and the Linux Brochure Project (lbproject.sf.net).
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Linux-powered Science
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