[J3] Syntax for enumeration

[Ondřej Čertík]

Dear Malcolm,

On Tue, Oct 15, 2019, at 4:51 PM, Malcolm Cohen via J3 wrote:
> Guys, we already **have** an ENUMERATOR statement.
> 
> 
> This suggested syntax is IMNSHO completely unacceptable. Having a 
> statement that is a simple list of names is crap. And has no place to 
> put anything useful like an accessibility attribute.
> 
> 
> The keyword ENUMERATOR signals extremely strongly that these are not components!
> 
> 
> In the common case one would write ENUMERATOR precisely once. This is 
> not a burden, let alone a great burden.

I understand what you are trying to say, as we independently (before
you sent this email) arrived at similar conclusions at the Data
subcommittee after discussing the various pros and cons. But I think
we should argue based on technical merits, as we did in the
subcommittee, and your email does not seem to explain why having a
simple statement that is a simple list of names is bad.

Some of the arguments against it are that all statements in Fortran   
start with a keyword, another one is that you can't put an attribute
to it as you mentioned (but you could argue to make ENUMERATOR
optional and only require it when attributes are present).

Regarding the length of ENUMERATOR, we discussed about 10 different
names (such as item, case, list, set, value, ...), but we didn't like
any of them better than ENUMERATOR.

In the end we arrived at similar conclusions as you did in this
particular case, but please let's try to keep the discussion
technical, as having a good explanation of arguments will have the
effect of moving the conversation forward.

Ondrej