Subject: C/Fortran Compatibility

From: [email-masked] (John Kapenga)
Date: Mon, 15 Feb 93 14:00:38 EST

Asking for compatibility is a lot in some respects.  going far
beyond the MPI interface - such as asking a malloc from a C
subroutine to "work" when called from a Fortran program.
(library name collisions - need for initializations for both
environments, cleaning up both environments  etc.)

I want to see them together too, but....

Perhaps we should not make it a full "requirement", but rather
be careful to set up the MPI language bindings so that they could
work together from C and Fortran. and indicate that this is intended
on environments supporting mixed programs.

I know of no standards work on mixed programs and recall the the
discussion of it (ANSI?) as a general area for standardization a
couple years back being postponed as too "hairy".

cheers - john

---

From: Bob Knighten <[email-masked]>
Date: Mon, 15 Feb 93 11:39:31 PST

POSIX Standardized Profiles are one standard arena where some effort is being
made to guarantee some expected level of interoperability.  My POSIX working
group (P1003.14) is producing the P1003.18 profile for "classic POSIX"
covering P1003.1 (system interfaces) and P1003.2 (shell and utilities).  This
does not include networks or any of the serious problems regarding
interoperability.  

In this context we have been struggling just to find reasonable requirements
to express such expectations as that a file written by a C program can be read
by a FORTRAN program or an Ada program.  We would not even dream of trying to
stadardized the way you might link routines produced by different language
compilers! 

-- Bob

Robert L. Knighten	             | [email-masked]
Intel Supercomputer Systems Division | 
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