(j3.2006) Syntax for US-08?

[Malcolm Cohen]

1. I do not feel it is necessary or even particularly desirable to attempt to 
"decide" the syntax before the meeting.  Discussion is fine and good, but 
decision is out of the question.

2. The "EXTERNAL,ONLY::" suggestion strikes me as being considerably worse than 
every alternative.

3. I would have thought Dan was suggesting "EXPLICIT :: EXTERNAL"; violating the 
convention that :: introduces a list of names or other user-defined entities is 
certainly a minus point.  A single colon would not fall foul of this convention 
though.

4. Dan's thought that we might want to make it capable of handling future 
conceivable extensions is well taken.  I think that using parentheses might be 
better than using colon or double-colon though, e.g. 
"EXPLICIT(<explicit-item-list>)" or "NO IMPLICIT (<explicit-item-list>)".  Maybe 
"NO IMPLICIT(TYPE)" would be short for "IMPLICIT NONE", and we could have "NO 
IMPLICIT(LEN)" to get rid of the implicit character-length==1.  (The latter is 
out of scope right now of course.)

> > > The ones I've seen proposed include
> > >
> > >  IMPLICIT NOEXTERNAL
> > >  IMPLICIT, EXTERNAL :: NONE
> > >  EXTERNAL, NOIMPLICIT
> > >  EXTERNAL, NONE
> > >  NO IMPLICIT EXTERNAL
> > >  EXTERNAL, EXPLICIT
> > >  EXPLICIT[,] EXTERNAL

If you are writing the paper, just put your top three into a straw vote and list 
the others in a "rejected syntax" section, preferably with reasons.

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