Re: [PATCH, ping] Cray Pointers

[Richard E Maine <Richard dot Maine at nasa dot gov>]

On Sep 16, 2005, at 7:29 AM, Steve Kargl wrote:

> Sigh, gfortran is becoming a cesspool for the bad design decisions
> of g77.

The thought has occurred to me more than once. :-(

Alas, it is actually quite difficult to avoid bad design decisions. 
Users will ask for them, either because the users have codes that 
depend on them or because the users have different ideas about what 
good design is (or both). Failing to listen to users is a bad idea, of 
course. But then, going along with every user request doesn't work 
either. For a start, there will be directly contradictory user 
requests.

You will even see users that misunderstand the features their own code 
is using and thus unintentionally give you incorrect information about 
what other compilers do. I've seen that one more than once. User says 
"this works on a Vax". I find old Vax in an obscure corner of the 
bulding. No it doesn't work. User says, "but my old codes 'just like 
that' worked". I look at actual old codes. User didn't understand how 
the features worked and thus incorrectly thought his new stuff was 
"just like that". Turns out that doing as the user asked would have 
introduced an incompatibility instead of fixing one. (In particular, 
user didn't understand the differences in semantics between the 
standard syntax for PARAMETER and the nonstandard form without the 
parens. User just thought they were alternate syntax for the same 
thing; that one is a common misunderstanding, I might add).

Even if you avoid the direct contradictions and misunderstandings, you 
can get a mess if you go too far down that path. I don't have a magic 
answer. I don't think there is one. It is a hard problem, which takes 
considerable thought, along with both the discipline to stick with a 
development plan, and also an open mind to see when a plan is hurting 
more than it is helping and needs to be revised. I've seen this kind of 
quandry on other projects as well.

Dealing with difficult problems like this is no doubt why y'all are 
paid the big bucks for this work.  :-)

--
Richard Maine                |  Good judgment comes from experience;
Richard.Maine@nasa.gov       |  experience comes from bad judgment.
                            |        -- Mark Twain