[J3] Question on dummy CLASS(*) pointer arguments

[Vipul Parekh]

Tom,

Will it be possible for you to provide some closing thoughts on this
particular matter from perspective and/or NASA colleagues as users of
Fortran?

You saw the feedback from the Fortran standard point-of-view, "Making this
valid would probably require a lot of extra words to make sure nothing gets
broken. It is certainly not obvious that there is any functionality here
worth the additional complication of the language."

So where does this leave the practitioners of Fortran?  Especially in the
context of working with program data, e.g., with NASA's use case, "The code
in question is part of asynchronous communication layer in which I save
addresses of arrays (C_LOC) which are then copied upon a signal at a later
time."

Also, can you please elaborate further re: "semi-obscure run-time errors"?
For example, with your statement:
"The current code does use TARGET for the dummy argument but results in
semi-obscure run time errors when the actual argument does not have the
TARGET attribute."  You need not get into any specific compiler names here
if you do not wish to do so.

Thanks,
Vipul

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