(j3.2006) Function returning procedure pointers

[Malcolm Cohen]

Hi folks,

Why did we pass an interp to make these happen?  They are really horrible, and 
violate our usual design rule of encapsulating things in derived types when 
building bigger things - whereas with these one can have a pointer to a function 
returning a pointer to a function returning a pointer to a function ... 
(unbounded recursion).

It's not that it's impossible to implement, but it's really horrid.  Does anyone 
accept the following yet?

Module junk
Contains
  Character(2) Function f0()
    f0 = 'ok'
  End Function
  Function f1()
    Procedure(f0),Pointer :: f1
    f1 => f0
  End Function
  Function f2()
    Procedure(f1),Pointer :: f2
    f2 => f1
  End Function
  Function f3()
    Procedure(f2),Pointer :: f3
    f3 => f2
  End Function
  Function f4()
    Procedure(f3),Pointer :: f4
    f4 => f3
  End Function
End Module
Program test
  Use junk
  Procedure(f0),Pointer :: p0
  Procedure(f1),Pointer :: p1
  Procedure(f2),Pointer :: p2
  Procedure(f3),Pointer :: p3
  Procedure(f4),Pointer :: p4
  p4 => f4
  p3 => p4()
  p2 => p3()
  p1 => p2()
  p0 => p1()
  Print *,p0()
End Program

Luckily we don't have to handle p4()()()()().  Yet.

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