David, David Edelsohn wrote:
I am not sure why you chose a period and how best to correct this.
Well, in principle any name which the user cannot enter would do. (Not enter: At least not as valid Fortran identifier.)
The reason for choosing "." is that <dot><var_name> is used elsewhere in gfortran for such identifier for the string-length variable belonging to <var_name>, e.g. "._result" in trans-decl.c. I assume the reason that it didn't pop up with those is that those are local variables, but I wouldn't be surprised if it would break elsewhere.
I wonder whether "@" would work, otherwise, one could also use "_". The only other problem is that it will break the ABI. On the other hand, it's a rather new feature and if we bump the .mod version number, the chance that one effectively forces the user to re-compile is rather high. So far we always bumped the .mod version number as something changed. There are also some other patches pending which effectively lead to a bump in the .mod version.
(The .mod version won't affect code which doesn't use modules such as BLAS/LAPACK or any Fortran 66/77 code, but those won't be affected by the ABI change anyway as there the name doesn't propagate as it does with modules..)
Thanks for investigating the test-suite failure. Tobias
