[J3] A couple more ideas for features

[ian.chivers at chiversandbryan.co.uk]

I assume that the proposed syntax for DO UNTIL()

 

Is

 

DO

 

  Block of statements

 

UNTIL()

 

Which is what I’m familiar with from Pascal and Modula 2,

and would be a 1 trip loop, i.e. the block of statements is

executed at least once.

 

From: J3 <j3-bounces at mailman.j3-fortran.org> On Behalf Of Brad Richardson via J3
Sent: Thursday, April 6, 2023 3:02 PM
To: General J3 interest list <j3 at mailman.j3-fortran.org>
Cc: Brad Richardson <everythingfunctional at protonmail.com>
Subject: Re: [J3] A couple more ideas for features

 

I don't see any reason to define "^" to be exponentiation, as we already have an operator for that, "**". Would the proposal be to allow "^" as a user defined operator? I suspect that would preclude us from using it for some intrinsic operation later, so I'm not sure if it's a good idea. I don't have a strong opinion though. While we're on the subject of operators though, is there a reason "_" is not allowed in user defined operators?

 

For DO UNITL(...), I like the expressive/readability aspect of it, but why is DO WHILE (.not. ...) insufficient?

 

Regards,

Brad

 

On Thu, 2023-04-06 at 13:53 +0000, Clune, Thomas L. \(GSFC-6101\) via J3 wrote:

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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