On Oct 22 2013, N.M. Maclaren wrote:

However, I have always felt that the original C approach was a horrible hack, just as having C's argument list (and arguments) writable is. There were good reasons at the time but, given that Fortran has done without it with little to no trouble for so long, I agree with Bill.

Sorry about following up to myself, but I need to clarify. My position is not that the functionality is inappropriate, but that the proposal is compounding other people's mistakes. It might be the best possible solution, given Fortran's constraints on pointers, but I am not sure that it is. I have never liked Fortran's interface, which was partly forced by the restrictions in Fortran 90 that were relaxed in Fortran 95 and 2003. Regards, Nick Maclaren.