[J3] A couple more ideas for features

[Clune, Thomas L. (GSFC-6101)]

Someone in the NASA community recently reached out to me with a few questions about the standard and potential new features.   After disabusing him of the ones that seemed non starters, I’m left with 2 that I feel obligate to float with the committee.

The first is a request to allow “^” as on operator.   The individual actually wanted to use it for numerical exponentiation, but I considered that to be a small benefit.   But it is true that Fortran has a relative paucity of symbols that can be used as operators, and most of those cannot be repurposed for use with intrinsics.    I suspect with generics, there may even be increased usage of user-defined operators, but admittedly this is purely conjectural.        I know we are frugal with allowing new characters, but maybe others have some solid use cases waiting to throw at this?

The other request was for a DO … UNTIL(cond)  to complement  DO WHILE(cond) …      I have no doubt that this request has come up before, so someone can quickly rattle off why it was not pursued?

His other requests were all either outside the standard (command line flag to change default behavior) or were features we actually already have and the user was merely unaware.

Cheers,


  *   Tom
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