Hello,
On 2008-08-19 21:22:58 -0400, nospam@see.signature (Richard Maine) said:
> Indeed. Obviously a lot of work there (and handily presented, too; kudos
> to whoever did that).
Thanks. Steve Lionel wrote the first draft. I polished it a bit,
and added the results from Friday papers, and those in the Post.
> I share Bob Corbett's concern about
> co-arrays.
Well, the complaint about coarrays is one of those fact-free complaints
that's hard to rebut just due to the lack of specifics.
OK, so something way cool may drop from the sky someday
that's better than coarrays. So what?
_What_ is going to magically appear, on _which_ day,
that's _how much_ better than coarrays, based upon _what_ criteria?
If you ask a specific question, you might, or might not,
have a point. Best must not kill better, especially when best
has not yet been made plainly to appear.
But I doubt parallel Fortran will disappear
as everyone rewrites their parallel codes in Fortress. :-)
> (Hmm. I haven't studied it, but I wonder if an implementation
> might be able to squeek by with allowing only a single image and then
> making most of the co-array stuff pretty much collapse into extra rank
> of ordinary arrays.)
Yes, it's allowed under the size and complexity clause.
One of the complaints about coarrays (from a vendor)
is that "my customers don't want or need parallelism".
To which the answer is given "you don't need parallel
execution". Which gets the reply "oh, if I parse
the square brackets, my customers will demand parallel execution".
As the ol' country judge said, "Pick a story, son. Stick with it."
> The "new" model (as of f95 or so) is that the intrinsic
> generics are described without reference to specifics. I think that new
> model should be consistently used everywhere. I thought that it was.
But, in fact, intrinsics like sqrt() are modeled just fine
as a collection of specifics (sqrt(), dsqrt(), csqrt()).
But things like *loc() (really, anything with the dim= present)
can't even be described as one function, let alone modeled
as a collection of specifics.
--
Cheers!
Dan Nagle
