Re: communicating the name of a function to deep within the call tree

glen herrmannsfeldt wrote:
James Giles wrote:
....
This is
clearly the result Phillip Helbig wants (with or without
clothes). If you redeclare the primaries within long_expression
this expression produces the correct result for whatever
new type and KIND of that expression. And it remains
legibly correct.

That is a good reason for writing it that way. Still, there is
the algebra tradition of writing coefficients first. Also,
it separates parts of two thirds, unless it really isn't two thirds.

I don't consider that to be as important as the ability to write
expressions that are generic with respect to their operands.
If Fortran had RATIONAL as a data type, and had Common
Lisp's rule of mixed-mode operation, we could both have
what we want:

(2/3)*(long_expression) ! doesn't work in Fortran

Short of that however, if I want to write code defensively
so that future changes of type and precision are easy, I need
to use what capabilities the language has. Further, we may
eventually have real generic programming features in
Fortran. If you insist on a style that requires syntactic
changes to expressions within the code when the types
of the dummy arguments change, that pretty much destroys
generic programming.

--
J. Giles

"I conclude that there are two ways of constructing a software
design: One way is to make it so simple that there are obviously
no deficiencies and the other way is to make it so complicated
that there are no obvious deficiencies." -- C. A. R. Hoare


.

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