...

2) I don't really see the point of this at all. The user can just call the native Fortran intrinsics directly. Why should there be a duplicate version that starts with MPI_ ? I would suggest, instead, that you just add a note in the spec (advice to users) point out that Fortran programmers can access the command line arguments using the language intrinsics. Maybe someone can convince me this is not adequate, but I've been using those intrinsics with parallel programs for some time and they work just fine.

I assume that the desire for this is to support the systems which do not use a mpiexec/mpirun command, but fire up MPI directly, as IBM poe does.

I merely want to provide symmetry in the standard. This is an important aspect and why we provide all a number of features that do not necessarily make sense in isolation.

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.

I do not see how Fortran has any power to fix this any more than C does. The perceived superiority of Fortran over C is not a valid argument within the MPI Forum. The MPI Forum only addressed the C case because Fortran did not have a standard way to access argc/argv until the 2003 specification. I do not understand your apparent argument that argc/argv are not useful. Do you assume that Fortran applications always use the exact same input filename? I know many Fortran codes that do this and it's really sad to see how they contort to provide a general workflow. Jeff -- Jeff Hammond [email protected]