To: J3                                                     J3/19-239
From: Vipul S. Parekh
Subject: Consider extended scope for enumeration types?
Date: 2019-October-14
Reference: 19-230, 19-229, 19-216r1,  18-256r1, 18-114r1

Introduction
============

Paper 19-229 introduces requirements that are beyond the scope considered
in 19-216r1 and 18-256r1: these include

1) An underlying type of an enumeration type that can be any intrinsic
   type including CHARACTER, LOGICAL, and REAL,

2) A mechanism to specify the kind of the underlying type e.g., an
   8-bit or a 128-bit integer,

3) Unordered enumeration types which then allow for the possibility of
   the the value of enumerators to be specified,

The use cases for the above are included in paper 19-229 and are based on
an extensive review of codebases developed in several programming
languages employed widely in chemical processing and manufacturing
industry including C++11 and later revisions, Microsoft.NET, Java,
Python, and Swift.  The development of a comprehensive facility toward
enumeration types in Fortran that supports such a wide spectrum of
beneficial use cases in scientific and technical programming in modern
implementations will be highly beneficial.  Getting enums "right" in
Fortran 202x will be a valuable step forward.

/DATA considers the above requirements to be inconsistent with WG5
response to 19-216r1 and J3 vote on 18-256r1

Question
========

Can there be a straw vote on the above items:

a) Consider items 1, 2, and 3 for enumeration types,
b) Consider items 2 and 3,
c) Consider item 2
d) Consider item 3
e) Do not consider any of these items.