[J3] Suggested editorial change
Bill Long
longb at cray.com
Sun Jul 19 11:33:36 EDT 2020
> On Jul 19, 2020, at 1:48 AM, Malcolm Cohen via J3 <j3 at mailman.j3-fortran.org> wrote:
>
> I was just looking at Table 16.1, as one does, and wincing at the ugly continuation lines sometimes due to a long intrinsic name and other times due to a long argument list, and wondering if it would look better than instead of
> • Four columns “Procedure”, “Arguments”, “Class”, “Description”
> we had
> • Three columns “Procedure (arguments)”, “Class”, “Description”
It would clean up many cases, though not all.
>
> I tried it out just on the SELECTED_whatever_KIND intrinsics, and indeed it eliminated the ugly continuations, at the (minor?) cost of no longer having the argument lists all line up.
What about cases of multiple argument lists? Such as
ATAN (X) or (Y,X)
Does that become
ATAN(X) or ATAN(Y,X)
or does it become 2 entries:
ATAN(X)
ATAN(Y,X)
I suspect the 2-entry format would work better for longer cases where there are 2 forms, with and without a DIM argument.
>
> I’m sure it would not eliminate all continuations, but...
>
> ...what do people think? Does this sound like a good idea?
Has potential.
Another helpful improvement, though one that could require a lot of editor time would be to hyperlink the procedure names to the subsequent subclause with the defaults on that procedure With the current large number on intrinsic procedures, scrolling as time consuming,. Perhaps more relevant, having the procedure names in BLUE font would make them stand out better in the new format.
Cheers,
BIll
>
> For most entries this is easy – it just takes deleting the first ampersand on the line, but entries that would still be continued may need a bit of extra work to make the continuation indented. So maybe an hour or so of editing time, depending on how fussy I get about the look of the result.
>
> Of course we could go back to the original format if people decide after seeing it that they don’t like it after all.
>
> Any and all comments welcome.
>
> Cheers,
> --
>
> ..............Malcolm Cohen, NAG Oxford/Tokyo.
>
>
Bill Long longb at cray.com
Principal Engineer, Fortran Technical Support & voice: 651-605-9024
Bioinformatics Software Development fax: 651-605-9143
Cray, a Hewlett Packard Enterprise company/ 2131 Lindau Lane/ Suite 1000/ Bloomington, MN 55425
More information about the J3
mailing list