Re: Is it time to legitimise REAL*8 etc?

Followup up to myself. I know...

Richard Maine <nospam@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:

James Giles <jamesgiles@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:

Well this is exacly the opposite of what Van Snyder told me
back when NON_KIND was removed as the keyword and LEN
was put in its place. He insisted that LEN type parameter were
only for string lengths and array sizes.

Sorry, but he was just wrong. Or maybe that was what he proposed. But it
sure is not what passed into the standard.

It occurs to me that I think I know what was being referred to. The
statement of it above isn't accurate, but that could have been either
Van misdescribing it, you misunderstanding what he said, a reflection of
an unpassed proposal, or whatever.

I do recall a somewhat related discussion, now that you prompt my
memory, of why some people (presumably including Van) disliked the term
nonkind and wanted it called length instead. The argument was that if
some other sort (have to choose the word carefully to avoid ones that
already have technical Fortran meanings - fortunately English has a lot
of synonyms for it) of type parameter came along later, the terms "kind"
and "nonkind" would more or less force us to categorize it as one or the
other of those, while the terms "kind" and "length" would not be so
restrictive.

But that was mostly just a debate about the terminology. I'm not
recalling whether someone might have wanted to actually restrict length
parameters to being lengths or sizes. The proposal might have been made,
and possibly even in conjunction with the proposal to use the term
"length" instead of "nonkind". While I don't recall it for certain, that
does bring twinges of familliarity. If so, the restrictive part of the
proposal didn't "fly", but the name choice did.

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

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