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).



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        Wulfraed                 Dennis Lee Bieber         AF6VN
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