What is PROTECTED supposed to protect for a pointer?

[FortranFan]

@sblionel

Nearly all of the development papers are written by the same few (and older) members. I would like to see that change.

@certik’s contributions are truly multifaceted, the list is too long, and they are immeasurably impactful all-around for the advancement of Fortran.

In the context of papers mentioned in the quoted comment above with the language standard and the committee and with PROTECTED, one can notice immediately the sea change brought out by @certik whereby @certik brought on board to the committee from the representing organization a new, young member who immediately started writing papers to advance the language which disproves the above assertion:

J3 Fortran - Documents for meeting 224

https://j3-fortran.org/doc/year/21/21-169r2.txt

Unfortunately none of the above work is going to make it to Fortran 2023 revision, the ball got dropped, and there are now sorry excuses.

There are some real deep-rooted problems starting with:

1. the attitude of minor revisions only leading toward utterly minimalist positions, wanting to do the least, defer anything appears somewhat complicated, let the compilers “catch up” when only one or two are putting in real effort to do so, kick the can down the road, etc. The two worklist items from the original Fortran 2023 project around PROTECTED semantics are casualties of this.
2. what gets worked on and what doesn’t on the language standard development comes across as a function of who is asking for what and also, how so. There have been too many papers and proposals submitted with Fortran over the years, including very recently, that get ignored or overlooked and the true reasons are non-technical. These are indications of tremendous organizational implicit bias and worse. There are no efforts in the actual two institutions to really grow beyond such old traits. All in all, it is not at all a welcoming and inclusive workflow for the truly global nature of Fortran practice with people of all backgrounds who are stakeholders of the language.

On the other hand, with the broader aspects of J3 Fortran proposals site and fortran-lang org and with specific aspects such as the work on Generics, the contributions by @certik to be welcoming and inviting and encouraging and facilitating contributions globally and most positively crowd-sourcing the advancement of Fortran with enthusiastic and energized minds all over the world is an indescribably positive example for WG5 and J3 committees to follow, it should be a real eye-opener - just take a look at these:

Prototype implementation of Fortran generics in LFortran

With the latest LFortran (022dbc29) you can now play with a prototype implementation of the Fortran generics. Here is a demo file that you can try: You can copy & paste that example into https://dev.lfortran.org/ and it will work: [Screen Shot 2022-11-05 at 3.30.51 PM] You can also test it locally: $ lfortran integration_tests/template_add.f90 The result is 1.22999992e+01 The result is 14 @tom_clune, @everythingfunctional, @gak, @FortranFan and others, can you please test it out and p…

Concerns regarding limitations in the current generics proposal

It’s good to go forward with some preliminary syntax, so that we have something to implement in a compiler and something concrete to play with. We absolutely are not done with the syntax, or even semantics or scope. We only achieved the first step. Now we need to iterate. @plevold why don’t you write down some examples how things could work. @everythingfunctional why don’t you meet with @plevold in a better time slot, so that he can be involved?