Subject: Mixed F77/C, MIMD(not SPMD)

From: [email-masked] (David Levine)
Date: Mon, 15 Feb 93 09:19:36 CST

X-Resent-To: [email-masked] ; Mon, 15 Feb 1993 07:54:12 EST
   Date: Mon, 15 Feb 93 12:54:01 GMT
   From: L J Clarke <[email-masked]>
   Reply-To: [email-masked]

   Dear MPI Colleagues

   I'd like to raise a couple of points which I hope we can discuss at the
   meeting later this week, after lenghty discussions with a variety of
   local users. 

   In general the objectives of the MPI Forum are very well received.  Two
   specific concerns, of a very general nature, became apparent. 

   a) The introduction says that MPI is for programmers who wish to write
   portable programs in C and/or Fortran77.  The choice of languages is
   fine, although some may wish to use C++ and Fortran90.  The concern is
   whether MPI intends to allow, and if so in what manner, mixed language
   programming, i.e.  programs written in a mixture of C and Fortran77. 

   The observation is that C is most useful for library programming,
   whereas a large number of applications that we deal with are written in
   Fortran77.  (Users did not expect MPI say anything about cross-calling
   and such murky business, that is outwith message passing.)

   I propose that the make a statement of intent, possibly in the
   introduction, that mixed languages will be allowed/supported (I would
   hope that we could not make the decision to not allow/support mixture of
   C and F77 :-). This seems an easy thing to do.

Let me second this, if for no other reason than the lack of dynamic memory
allocation in Fortran 77, and the relatively small physical memory available
on the nodes of distributed-memory machines.  In porting Fortran 77 codes to
distributed-memory machines I consider the use of C for dynamic memory
allocation to be "mandatory."

--dave levine