Subject: hpff-doc: Comments on Portable/Efficient

From: [email-masked] (Carl Offner)
Date: Tue, 10 Sep 1996 10:41:11 -0400

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Andy and Chuck--

	Some comments on the latest version that I have of the "Coding
for Portable Performance in HPF" chapter:

		--Carl

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**References to the "HPF Kernel" should be deleted, and the wording in
general changed from forms such as "X is included" to "X is
recommended".

**PURE Functions and Subroutines: Even better is using only pure
functions that do not access non-local data.

**Pointers:  in HPF 2.0, pointers can't point to mapped objects in any
case.

**INHERIT:  better to say that in general the INHERIT directive is NOT
recommended.  The only real exceptions are when writing library
routines, in which case the user would presumably write code that
dispatches on the distribution.  This is a real issue, because many
users will otherwise feel that INHERIT is an efficient construct and
avoid thinking about their distributions by simply slapping INHERIT
everywhere they can -- I have seen this happen several times.

**Subroutine interfaces:  In view of what is now in HPF 2.0, much of
this is unnecessary -- the restrictions are already part of the
language.  Also, assumed-shape arguments require an explicit interface
by the rules of Fortran anyway.

**DYNAMIC -- not in HPF 2.0

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