[J3] A couple more ideas for features

[Van Snyder]

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?

My colleagues asked for "\", as in MatLab, so they could define an
operator useful to write matrix expressions involving multiplication on
the left by a matrix inverse.
> 
> 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?

This was on the list from my colleagues, e.g. section 2.1.7 in 03-
258r1, but not a feature request at that time. 04-112 and 04-159 were
feature requests. JOR recommended no action (see 04-265r1.xls).
> 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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