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MPI-1 used informal naming conventions. In many cases, MPI-1 names
for C functions are of the form Class_action_subset and in
Fortran of the form CLASS_ACTION_SUBSET, but this rule is
not uniformly applied. In MPI-2, an attempt has been made to
standardize names of new functions according to the following
rules. In addition, the C++ bindings for MPI-1 functions also follow
these rules (see Section C++ Binding Issues
). C and Fortran function
names for MPI-1 have not been changed.
1. In C, all routines associated with a particular type of MPI object
should be of the form Class_action_subset or, if no subset
exists, of the form Class_action. In Fortran, all routines
associated with a particular type of MPI object should be of the form
CLASS_ACTION_SUBSET or, if no subset exists, of the form
CLASS_ACTION. For C and Fortran we use the C++ terminology
to define the Class. In C++, the routine is a method on
Class and is named MPI::Class::Action_subset.
If the routine is associated with a certain class, but
does not make sense as an object method, it is
a static member function of the class.
2. If the routine is not associated with a class, the name
should be of the form Action_subset in C and
ACTION_SUBSET in Fortran,
and in C++ should be scoped in the MPI namespace,
MPI::Action_subset.
3. The names of certain actions have been standardized. In
particular, Create creates a new object, Get
retrieves information about an object, Set sets
this information, Delete deletes information,
Is asks whether or not an object has a certain property.
C and Fortran names for MPI-1 functions violate these rules
in several cases. The most common exceptions are the omission
of the Class name from the routine and the omission of
the Action where one can be inferred.
MPI identifiers are limited to 30 characters (31 with the profiling
interface). This is done to avoid exceeding the limit on some
compilation systems.
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MPI-2.0 of July 18, 1997
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