My point was that new users of Fortran are often surprised by many of the older features I mentioned, just like I was surprised by using a pointer-expression on the left-hand side of an assignment. Telling me this isn’t of any consideration, and to simply “get on with it” because the feature has been there for a dozen of years feels disparaging and is of no help.
Previously at Discourse
Richard Maine, editor of Fortran 95 and 2003 standards, has advised against writing functions that return pointers.
Who should I listen to now and why, @FortranFan or Richard Maine? Under what conditions is a solution that uses a function returning a pointer acceptable or perhaps even preferred? If you’d be willing to share this knowledge with us based upon your actual lived experiences I’d appreciate that.