[Patch, fortran] PR51976 - [F2003] Support deferred-length character components of derived types (allocatable string length)

[Damian Rouson]

> And finally, I think it would be really useful to many users (the CC
> count on the bugzilla PR is rather high - btw I was trying to find a
> way to search for PRs with high CC counts, but unfortunately that does
> not seem to be possible in bugzilla).

I’m writing to support the notion that deferred-length character components is of great interest to the user community.  I’ve seen comments to that effect on comp.lang.fortran many times.  I’ve also heard it from my students and readers of my book.  This feature, along with type finalization and coarray support, is one of the last features required for gfortran to compile all the code in my book.  In addition to the code from the book, I can offer a few other test codes once this feature hits the trunk.  I typically install the gcc49 port from macports.org, which updates weekly, so I should be able to test the feature soon after it hits the trunk.

I really hope this makes it into the 4.9 release.

Damian