Re: Comment on new INTENT paragraph

Tom Robey (trobey@borris.khoros.unm.edu)
Tue, 13 May 1997 09:50:08 -0600 (MDT)

Michael Hennecke wrote
>
> A comment on the MPI-2 Draft (April 17, 1997):
>
> Section 2.3, page 5 contains a new (Apr) paragraph on INTENT:
>
> "MPI's use of OUT, IN and INOUT is intended to indicate to the user how
> an argument is to be used, but does not provide a rigorous classification
> that can be translated directly into language bindings (e.g. INTENT in
> Fortran 90 bindings or const in C bindings). ..."
>
> I would strongly recommend that this paragraph be removed from the document.
> It does nothing than confusing the user, and makes *any* Fortran90 binding
> which wants to specify INTENT (for performance and/or safety) completely
> impossible.
>

This was thoroughly discussed at the last meeting and this paragraph is
consistent with that discussion. The problem is that something in an opaque
object may change even though nothing accessible by the user changes. Thus
a rigorous classification may not be possible. If a rigorous classification
is used then every argument would be INOUT which would defeat the purpose of
INTENT. I would suggest adding that the rigor of the classification is
implementation dependent since most implementations probably do not want
rigorous classification, but some may want to do this if they want to
address FORTRAN 90 issues.

-- 
Thomas H. Robey
trobey@khoral.com
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