Re: [4.8, Fortran, Patch] PR 48820 - Support TYPE(*) of TS29113

[Tobias Burnus <burnus at net-b dot de>]

Dear Paul,

thanks for the review.

Paul Richard Thomas wrote:
> I have a couple of remarks:
> (i) The DTYPE_TYPE_MASK is 0x38 so that we saturated it a long time
> since!  At the moment it does not cause any problems because of the
> extremely limited use of the dtype 'type'.  Whilst the array
> descriptor revamp will eliminate such worries, we should be mindful of
> this; and

Thanks for the reminder. I kind of expected such an issue - and decided 
not to worry about it.

> (ii) By making such substantial use of scan-tree-dump-times in the
> dg-run test case, you are potentially building in instability against
> future development, I suppose?  Are the runtime tests not sufficient?

In principle, run-time tests are sufficient. But they rely on C tests - 
or at least on a working C_LOC. However, one currently cannot use 
C_LOC() on assumed-shape variables nor BIND(C) for assumed-shape 
dummies. [Which is allowed in TS29113.]  Besides, the C program needs 
then to make use of gfortran's array descriptor to really check.

I tried a bit, but it gets rather complicated so that at some point, I 
gave up, deleted the traces of the C code and surrendered. I checked the 
argument manually and added them to the scan-tree-dump-times. I tried 
carefully to use them such that they should work on all targets. 
However, if the array descriptor will change, they might break. However, 
the work to fix them once or twice might be less than writing a run-time 
test.

Tobias