(j3.2006) A few constants from ISO_Fortran_env for C interop

[Bill Long]

On 10/24/11 1:43 PM, Van Snyder wrote:
> One of my colleagues is working on some software that needs to be told
> the Fortran I/O unit to which output should be written.
>
> For two of the destinations, he wants the defaults to be OUTPUT_UNIT and
> ERROR_UNIT from ISO_Fortran_env.
>
> The unit numbers are set in a structure.
>
> He'd like to be able to use the code from C, so he's written a BIND(C)
> interface layer.
>
> A question he asked, that I couldn't answer, is how the C program knows
> the values of OUTPUT_UNIT and ERROR_UNIT.
>
> Should we add these values (and maybe a few more from ISO_Fortran_env)
> to ISO_Fortran_binding.h?

No.  This is an extreme end case, and I'm not keen on piling stuff into 
ISO_Fortran_binding.h for single users.  Also, it is generally better 
for maintenance  to avoid having constants defined in multiple places.

>
> An alternative is to ask the C caller to call a BIND(C) Fortran
> procedure that returns the values.  That seems a bit like a kluge.
>

That would be a better solution.  Alternatively, a user-written module, 
that has a USE of ISO_Fortran_env,  could be supplied that declared 
bind(c) variables that were initialized to these constants.  Then the C 
user could just reference the variables directly.   You might name them 
Fortran_stdout and Fortran_stderr, for example.

Cheers,
Bill


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-- 
Bill Long                                           longb at cray.com
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