On Fri, May 17, 2019 at 9:57 PM Jerry DeLisle <jvdeli...@charter.net> wrote: > > On 5/17/19 10:48 AM, Jeff Law wrote: > > My first, second and third thought has been we shouldn't be catering to > > code that is so clearly broken. Maybe we could do this on the release > > branches which would in turn give folks roughly a year to fix up this mess? > > > > jeff > > > > Not that I have much say, but I have been following this thread and the others > about broken wrappers and screwed up prototypes being used by R for there use > of > LAPACK. I have been holding off saying anything. > > I don't thing we should be doing anything in gfortran at all. I think the R > people need to fix their calls. People get caught by not following the proper > conventions and then want the compiler to fix it. Its not the compiler writers > job to fix users bad code. The Fortran conventions of having the string > lengths > appended to the end has been known for many many years and well documented > everywhere. > > Sorry for ranting and I understand everyone is just trying to do the right > thing. It would have been about an editorial fix on the R side. > > Maybe Jeff as a good compromise here in that at least we would not have to > carry > it forward in time.
I don't think it's this simple, unfortunately. If it would be only R, then yes, we could help the R people fix their code and then it would all be done. But seems this is everywhere. It's in CBLAS & LAPACKE (the official BLAS and LAPACK C interfaces), it's in numpy (probably scipy also), R, arma. And BLAS/LAPACK are pretty central, and probably the single biggest reason why non-Fortran programmers use Fortran code. And while the issue has been known, it seems to have been happily ignored for the past 30 years. And yes, while I think one year might be a quite optimistic timeframe to get this fixed, I agree we shouldn't keep the workaround indefinitely either. I think the best way would be if CBLAS & LAPACKE would be fixed, and then we could tell people to use those rather than their own in-house broken interfaces. -- Janne Blomqvist
