[Patch, Fortran] OOP: merging fortran-dev to trunk?

[Janus Weil]

2009/11/30 Toon Moene <toon@moene.org>:
> Janus Weil wrote:
>
>> I have been discussing quite a bit with Paul and Tobias on how to
>> proceed. It's a bit of a nasty situation, since we do have *some* OOP
>> in 4.5, but for sure it won't be perfect. [One of the most tricky
>> aspects is that there are situations where compilation goes through
>> fine, but stuff fails at runtime (cf. PR41829). These issues are the
>> same on the trunk and fortran-dev.]
>>
>> My proposal would be to merge the current state of fortran-dev to the
>> trunk now, and leave the advanced TBP stuff that Paul is working on
>> for 4.6. As I said, the features on the branch can be considered to be
>> rather stable (the more experimental stuff has not been committed
>> yet), and most of it is rather low-risk wrt regressions, since it is
>> hidden behind BT_CLASS guards.
>
> From a birds-eye perspective (as I haven't followed the progress on this
> carefully), I think that - whatever we do - 4.5 will contain *some* OOP.
>
> The best way forward, as far as I am concerned, is to commit to trunk all
> from fortran-dev that is deemed usable and stable enough, and then try to
> *document* what works and what doesn't.

Right. Documentation is an important point. I have already started to
collect some info about our OOP implementation on the wiki, and we
should definitely extend this some more and document it in the manual.

Also, we should probably try to include additional checks, to make
sure that stuff which will fail at runtime is already rejected at
compile-time. However, I'm not quite sure how difficult this would be,
or how much we would have to reject ...

Cheers,
Janus