Subject: NUMBER_OF_PROCESSORS . . .

From: David Loveman <[email-masked]>
Date: Mon, 1 Jun 92 10:38:35 PDT

Guy-

The issue you raise when you say

>My one suggestion is that computers that are unreservedly committed
>to being single processors might be regarded as having a scalar processor
>arrangement, and we might want to have an example reflecting that:

> For a BananaKlone 2000 laptop, which has a single processor,
> the value of NUMBER_OF_PROCESSORS( ) is 1, and there is
> no valid value of DIM for which NUMBER_OF_PROCESSORS may be called.

> For a BananaKlone 2000 laptop, which has a single processor,
> the value of PROCESSORS_SHAPE() is [] (that is, an empty rank-one array).

is, of course, the theological one:  are scalars and one element arrays
"the same" or are they "different?"

I guess it depends on whether or not we support sequence and storage
association in HPF, or not (small joke).  I guess I do have a slight
bias in favor of accepting your amendment, but I am interested in
hearing other views also.

Also, I'm really not quite sure what a "processor" is, except to say
its a concept that is implementation-defined.  For example, what do you
do with multiple function units?  Or with a MIMD computer each of whose
nodes is a small number of cpus (maybe each with its own local memory,
or cache) sharing a memory.

-David

---

From: Guy Steele <[email-masked]>
Date: Mon, 1 Jun 92 14:53:03 EDT

Date: Mon, 1 Jun 92 10:38:35 PDT
   From: David Loveman <[email-masked]>
   Apparently-To: [email-masked], [email-masked]

   Guy-

But in fact they are different in Fortran 90.  There are lots of places
where a 1-element array is acceptable and a scalar is not, or vice versa.