Python/Fortran interoperability

Richard Maine nospam at see.signature
Mon Aug 24 17:39:32 EDT 2009


James Van Buskirk <not_valid at comcast.net> wrote:

> "Richard Maine" <nospam at see.signature> wrote in message 
> news:1j4y84p.v5docbtueccmN%nospam at see.signature...
> 

> > One might plausibly regard this as a kludge, but it is a kludge that is
> > part of the Fortran standard and is guaranteed to work with all Fortran
> > compilers. I almost said all f2003-compliant compilers (admittedly a
> > limited set), but then I recalled that the feature actually dates back
> > to f77 when character type was introduced; f2003 just extends it to the
> > C character kind for the obscure case where the C character kind might
> > be different from the default character kind (I don't know of any
> > compilers where this is so, but the standard allows for it).
> 
> No, this is a tricky point.  It was allowed in f77 to pass an array
> actual argument to a scalar character dummy argument, but the ability
> to pass a scalar character actual argument to an array dummy argument
> is new to the sequence association rules of f2003.  So your first
> impression was more accurate than the result of thoughtful reflection :)

Ah. You might be right - probably you are. I know there is some closely
related stuff that goes back a ways and was just extended to the C
character kind in f2003, but it might not have been that exact bit. I'm
probably thinking of the rule for sequence association that allows the
character length parameter to differ between the actual and dummy... as
long as you are doing sequence association. But it might be a new rule
that puts the scalar case under sequence association; that's probably
it. Not worth dragging out the standards to check, but I bet that's it.

-- 
Richard Maine                    | Good judgment comes from experience;
email: last name at domain . net | experience comes from bad judgment.
domain: summertriangle           |  -- Mark Twain



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