Re: Implications of indexing changes for code that calls Fortran

[Nicholas Jankowski]

On Jan 2, 2017 12:03 PM, "John W. Eaton" <address@hidden> wrote:
>
> With the recent changes for octave_idx_type, some changes will be needed for most code that calls Fortran.  I've already made these changes for Octave itself, but Octave Forge code that passes integers to Fortran code is currently broken unless Octave is built with --disable-64.  Most such code assumes that octave_idx_type is the same size as a Fortran INTEGER but that is no longer always the case.  Instead, octave_f77_integer_type (AKA F77_INT) is now the same size as a Fortran INTEGER and it may not always be the same size as octave_idx_type.

Will these be hard fails (code halting error) or soft fails (incorrect answers that may or may not be obvious, and could be an ongoing reliability concern)?  I would hope the former (overflow errors), but are there possible cases of the latter? Is finding problem areas just a matter of grep'ing each package source for a keyword?