Re: [Chasm-interop-devel] followup from cca meeting

[Gary K. <ku...@ll...>]

Craig,

I think we're all agreed that:

  1.  You made important contributions to the Fortran standard
      that we all will benefit from.  Thank you!

  2.  Chasm should not be needed in the future and we should
      begin planning for a graceful retirement.

I understand if you're less interested in supporting Chasm and
would rather move on to new things.  *I* just don't want
to lose any customers by dropping Chasm like a hot potato.

Can we agree Chasm is entering the endgame of its lifecycle
and that a gradual drawdown best serves Chasm's customers?

Gary


On Fri, 19 Oct 2007, Craig Rasmussen wrote:

>
> On Oct 19, 2007, at 11:51 AM, Tom Epperly wrote:
>
>> A new F2003 binding will start using F2003 capabilities. When will retire 
>> the F77 and F90 bindings when people stop using those languages.
>
> Unlike C and C++, there is one language Fortran and as far as I know, all of 
> the major vendors have only one compiler.  What people mean when they say F77 
> is implicit interfaces with fixed format input.  Usually, F90 is used to 
> imply explicit interfaces with free format input.  One can choose to program 
> in any of these styles (including mixing implicit and explicit interfaces 
> with either fixed or free form) using any modern compiler.
>
> As I understood from Matt, the discussion was whether the Chasm hacks (which 
> seem to work well) could be dropped in favor language standards supported by 
> the compiler vendors.  I'm not certain, but I'm pretty sure that the C 
> interoperability standard with work quite well for Babel users.  I believe 
> the following is correct:
>
> 1. Support for implicit interfaces (i.e., F77 bindings) would remain the 
> same.  This should work with any compiler and compiler version.
>
> 2. Support for explicit interfaces (i.e,. F90 bindings) "could" be switched 
> to C interop with no impact on users, thus retiring Chasm.
>
> The primary reason I joined the Fortran standards committee was to get Chasm 
> capabilities into the language.  I've nearly succeeded but time will tell.
>
> Cheers,
> Craig
>