What is the origin of NAMELIST?

[jacobwilliams]

Some kind of variable/type introspection is something i was thinking about for this:

Introspection in Fortran for generic file I/O libraries

What would it take to be able to write an I/O library (JSON, TOML, etc.) for Fortran that was as easy for a user to use as the built-in namelists (which, frankly, people shouldn’t be using). Currently, users of the libraries for modern file formats have to write a lot of verbose code, since there’s not currently any way for the generic library to know anything about the variables in their custom types. An example: type :: mytype integer, dimension(:),allocatable :: ints character(len=10) :: …