On Monday 28 April 2008 12:49, Lionel, Steve wrote:

My personal preference is for choice 4, the IGNORE attribute (the specific spelling can be debated... There seems to be strong sentiment with some against such a thing, which I don't fully understand. Steve, I will throw this one back at you. I asked earlier, but never got a response:

What happens if the dummy (with the IGNORE attribute) is declared as INTEGER(4), and things are performed inside that the standard defines only for 4-byte integers (e.g., some bit packing operation). Then, the routine is called with a REAL(8) array? What if the array is of a derived type of size 1 byte? What specifically will Intel Fortran do? Compile and give results that make no sense? If so, the standard must have *specific* restrictions on what the actual is allowed to be, and what it means. Only illegal cases can be left without a meaning. What does Cray do? If the routine is written in C and has a void* argument, I understand how it works. But I do not understand how it works if "everything is written in Fortran". Best, Aleks