Edit: Moved to https://github.com/fortran-lang/stdlib
I'm opening this meta issue with the goal of a broad and open-ended discussion around specific proposals that aim to add intrinsic procedures to the standard. Recent examples of such proposals are: #96, #100, #101, #103.
While I'm personally in support of most such proposals, I often see them as putting the cart before the horse. Why so? A common argument for such additions is that they are commonly used and often re-implemented over and over again because they're not available as intrinsics. I get this. However, if such intrinsics are really needed, I imagine there'd be an obvious choice of a 3rd party library available. Reusable and open libraries emerge when the pain is high enough in the community. That's how datetime-fortran came about. Lack of open source libraries may be a signal that there just isn't great need for such procedures.
Should we, as the Fortran community, consider working on a non-standard library that would include such procedures that we aim to the propose to the committee for inclusion in the standard? This library, or a subset of it, could over time become a candidate for the Fortran standard library, in addition to built-in intrinsics.
I foresee multiple benefits:
There are quite a few projects in this spirit, such as Arjen's flibs and Ondrej's fortran-utils. Such libraries could serve as design examples, and perhaps even contribute implementations toward a dedicated non-stdlib.
septcolor, certik, ivan-pi, epagone, victorsndvg and 4 more
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