Object-oriented Fortran

[Daniel Kraft]

Rouson, Damian wrote:
> 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.

Hi Damian,

welcome :)

> 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.

I hope there aren't too many bugs with type-bound procedures in there... 
  For finalization, I'm pretty sure we're going to go for it in 4.5 but 
I've not really an idea when we can start / finish with it.

> 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.

Abstract types yes, but unfortunatelly no deferred bindings.  They 
would've been the next project for me (and probably will be the first to 
work on again), but they didn't make it for the 4.4 "fixes and 
documentation changes only" deadline.

Depending on how bugfixing goes and how the release-plan really is, I 
think however we could eventually start working on new features as 
patches a little before branching of 4.5 so we've got the patches quite 
ready when we can check in.  What do others think about this?  Is this a 
good idea or has experience (maybe) shown that it's not so good for 
various reasons?  I don't think there will be many conflicts for stage3 
check-ins.

Yours,
Daniel


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