Support for submodules ?

[Tobias Burnus]

John Chludzinski wrote:
> I'm starting a potentially large Fortran project and doing some
> gfortran inventory.  Just noticed "submodules", apparently a Fortran
> analog to Ada's "package body".
...
> Is there support for this in the upcoming 4.8?

No.

I concur that submodules are nice. They were even regarded as that nice 
that the Fortran committee has put them into a Technical Report (ISO/IEC 
TR 19767:2005), which was published in 2005 - way before Fortran 2008. 
Also the authors of "Fortran 95 & 2003 explained" stated that submodules 
will likely be implemented before compilers finish implementing Fortran 
2003 (!).

Well, it turned out that submodules are one of the last features of 
Fortran 2008 which get implemented. Don't ask me why. To my knowledge, 
only Cray's ftn currently supports them.

For gfortran, it also seems as if other items (FINAL subroutines, 
deferred-length strings, new array descriptor, ...?) will have a higher 
priority. Thus, my prediction is that not even 4.9 will support 
submodules. In a year we will know more Â…

Tobias

PS: Just for completeness, gfortran is nearly entirely developed in the 
spare time by unpaid developers. That makes a prediction when certain 
features get implemented more difficult. If you are interested in 
helping with the gfortran development - or if know someone who might be, 
please tell us. I think there will be also another Google Summer of Code 
programme - thus a student ([high school(?) or] undergraduate to PhD 
student) could have the fun and satisfaction of contributing and could 
even get some money for it. Nearly all current contributors come from 
natural science, which shows that one doesn't need to have a degree in 
computer science.