Proposal: Generic Programming

[jacobwilliams]

... there are many ideas floating around for this...

[zbeekman]

+1,000,000,000,000

Currently, verbosity and lack of DRY (don't repeat yourself) make Fortran a real PITA sometimes. Some enhanced generic programming capabilities are greatly needed. We don't need the nightmarish "what is the type of this object" that sometimes accompanies this (I'm looking at you, Python) and I don't think templating is the answer either.

[cmacmackin]

There was a proposal several years back for parameterised modules which looked quite promising. It was abandoned for some reason, though, so perhaps there was some fundamental problem.

[jacobwilliams]

Yes, I've seen that before (wow, it's over a decade old...)

It's not clear to me if this proposal allows one parameterized model to use another parameterized module, and have the input of one pass through to the other. Is that in there somewhere? Without that, it's not very useful in my option. Imagine you have dozens of interdependent modules that you want to use for reals, integers, custom types, etc...