On Mar 13, 2009, at 9:40 AM, William Gropp wrote:

First, this is a chicken-and-egg problem; the low level interfaces are unlikely to change to add const unless there is some application that will take advantage of that (and internally, if their semantics allows it and their compiler can support it, they'll just cast to add the const). So MPI should take the lead, particularly since using const also provides information to the user.

This is a very scary statement to me. MPI has not traditionally "taken the lead" on forcing issues with other interfaces (look where it has gotten us with Fortran...). Indeed, MPI has taken great pains to be the lowest common denominator across a variety of language, platforms, and operating systems. -- Jeff Squyres Cisco Systems