new proposal to vector intrinsics in Fortran

[FX]

Hi,

(Toon: there's a question that's partly for you, about the Standard
committee; see the one marqued with [**].)

Please don't start pinging to ask for answers less than 24 hours after
your initial mail! We (maintainers) read and will reply, but you can't
possibly expect an answer in a matter of hours.

> Could any reviewer be
> so kind to take a little bit time and look over this proposal?

Taking a bit of time to think it through, in fact, is radically
different than replying at the very minute you receive the email. I
can't speak for other but I have read your mail thoroughly and have
started a draft reply, but will send it after giving it some more
thoughts (and after looking up a few things in the code). Probably
other maintainers are doing the same. In any case, we're all
volunteers with day jobs that do not involve GCC/gfortran, and will
have different time constraints than yours: e.g., I will probably
reply this week-end, when I get time to do it.

> Still you could choose to reject it, but please say it aloud and don't simply ignore it.

We certainly will make a decision on that. However, the time window
for that decision will be more than a few days, you have to realize
that. (Also, talking about timescales, I hope that you're aware of GCC
development rules and of the fact that this new feature, if included,
will only be incorporated in the forthcoming 4.4 development branch).

In the meantime, here are a few points that I wanted to raise:

  -- I think that vector types are a interesting feature because of
the recent evolution of processors, but I'd like to understand better
what currently exist in that domain: you already told us (with links
to appropriate documentation) what the IBM compiler does, but what
about other compilers?

  -- What is the community demand for it? Who would use it? (Who
already uses the IBM extensions?) It needs to be worth incorporating
and maintaining.

  -- [**] If there is community demand for this, it will end up in a
later Fortran standard: have there already been such proposals or
plans? We want to make sure that, if we create a functionality, it is
as close as possible to a future standard proposal.

For the last two points, I think a nice thing would be to ask on
comp.lang.fortran to gather opinions. Some very knowledgeable and
influential people hang there, so I think that's a necessary step. How
does that sound to you?

FX