[RFC] polymorphic arrays

[Paul Richard Thomas]

Dear Mikael,

I just posted a message saying that I could not find this thread - I
did not go back far enough :-)

> Be realistic, vote (1). [And don't forget to donate ;-)]
>

For what it is worth, this is my opinion too.  In fact, like you, I
believe that the $data field should be the descriptor.  The reasons
are pretty much as you said:

(i) Code reuse - ie CLASS(mytype), allocatable, dimension(:) :: z is
then directly implementable as TYPE :: <mangled name>; type(mytype),
allocatable, dimension(:) :: $data; type(<mangled name vtab type>) ::
$vptr; end type ; TYPE(<mangled name>) :: z

(ii) This effectively implements (ii) since the $vptr field is tagged
on to the end of the descriptor.

(iii) This maintains the goal of having OOP largely implemented in the
fortran frontend.

Cheers

Paul