Object-oriented Fortran

["Rouson, Damian" <rouson at sandia dot gov>]

I just joined this mailing list and would like to contribute in any way I
can as a user/tester of any new object-oriented programming features.

I also want you all to know your efforts are having a significant and
positive impact on my work.  I am writing Fortran interfaces for an
open-source, scalable, object-oriented C++ mathematical library
(http://trilinos.sandia.gov/).  The project technical leader has given me
the green light to use any standard feature supported by gfortran under the
assumption that gfortran will play a leadership role, pushing commercial
vendors to follow. Thus, your work is shaping the overall coding practices
of my project.

Since the rest of our library is object-oriented and we want to maintain
that philosophy throughout, I exploit every new object-oriented feature you
check in, e.g., I am already using type-bound procedures. In case it's of
interest, it would really be nice to have allocatable derived types (do you
support that already?).  Alternatively, type finalization would be nice, but
I could very likely do without final procedures if I had access to
allocatable derived types.

Damian

P.S. I just posted a question to the Gnu Fortran newsgroup asking whether
gfortran supports deferred bindings in abstract types yet. This is not
important for the aforementioned project, but I plan to start using it for
another project in a few months.