Re: Fortran 2003 compliant replacements for Netcdf FORTRAN interfaces

Russ Rew <address@hidden> writes:

> Hi Rick,
>
>>   The attached gzipped tar file contains my implementation of new
>> FORTRAN interfaces that use the FORTRAN 2003 C interoperability facility
>> to replace your current C based wrapper routines with standard
>> conforming FORTRAN code. I don't know if anyone in the netCDF community
>> has done something similar. If they have, then you have another
>> implementation to compare against. I've tested the new interfaces with
>> the two compilers I have access to (CRAY X1 and g95) that support the
>> F03 C interop. facility. However, I would like to release it to the
>> netCDF community for further testing with compilers I don't have access
>> to (such as version 10 of IBM's xlf compiler for AIX and Linux). There
>> is a PDF in the tar file that describes the new interfaces and my
>> motivations for developing them. 
>> 
>> Let me know what you think and if this work is something UCAR is
>> interested in developing further.
>

Yipee! I didn't know about this Fortran 2003 thing either. What a
fantastic idea!

> We are about to make a 3.6.2 release.  I see that the compressed tar
> you sent is a complete replacement for 3.6.1.  [Ed: it's in
> /scratch/russ/netcdf-3.6.1-f03/].  Do you think it would be practical
> to maintain a set of patches so this could be applied to later
> releases than 3.6.1?  Alternatively, maybe our autotools approach
> could detect whether the Fortran compiler supports C interoperability
> and use it in that case.

I will read the pdf file and study the code and we will see how this
might best be handled.

> This has the potential to eliminate a lot of the support questions we
> get about the Fortran-C interface with various compilers and
> development platforms.

When every compiler supports this, it will make life really very much
easier.

But when will that be I wonder?

Rick, do you have any sense as to how widely this feature is
supported?

Thanks!

Ed

-- 
Ed Hartnett  -- address@hidden