On Fri, 25 Feb 2022 21:44:14 -0800, Dan Stromberg <drsali...@gmail.com> declaimed the following:
>Fortran, (still last I heard) did not support pointers, which gives Fortran >compilers the chance to exploit a very nice class of optimizations you >can't use nearly as well in languages with pointers. > Haven't looked much at Fortran-90/95 then... Variable declaration gained a POINTER qualifier, and there is an ALLOCATE intrinsic to obtain memory. And with difficulty one could get the result in DEC/VMS FORTRAN-77 since DEC implemented (across all their language compilers) intrinsics controlling how arguments are passed -- overriding the language native passing: CALL XYZ(%val(M)) would actually pass the value of M, not Fortran default address-of, with the result that XYZ would use that value /as/ the address of the actual argument. (Others were %ref() and %descr() -- descriptor being a small structure with the address reference along with, say, upper/lower bounds; often used for strings). -- Wulfraed Dennis Lee Bieber AF6VN wlfr...@ix.netcom.com http://wlfraed.microdiversity.freeddns.org/ -- https://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list