(j3.2006) German comment 1.

[Malcolm Cohen]

>Comment 1 of the German ballot proposes to disallow the ALLOCATABLE and POINTER 
>attributes on an assumed-rank array in order to allow for a possible future 
>"deferred-rank" array concept within Fortran.

Seems reasonable.

>the unlikely addition of deferred-rank objects within Fortran code is 
>outweighed by the usefulness of allowing ALLOCATABLE and POINTER for 
>assumed-rank.

This is only useful for people writing C code, and is functionality not 
available in Fortran.  I am in principle not in favour of adding functionality 
that is not available in Fortran - either the functionality is useful in which 
case it should be usable without resorting to C, or it is not useful in which 
case we should not be distorting the Fortran language for the minor convenience 
of C programmers.

The point of the TR was, for the sake of mixed-language programming, to give C 
programmers better access to Fortran features - not to give them shiny new 
features that don't even exist in Fortran.  It seems to me that this particular 
feature is slightly overstepping the line here.

I am not vehemently opposed to this feature (or I would have spoken out 
earlier), but in a straw vote I would almost certainly vote "No" unless I heard 
some convincing technical arguments, in which case I might go with "Undecided".

Cheers,
-- 
................................Malcolm Cohen, Nihon NAG, Tokyo.