To: J3                                                     J3/23-216r1
From:      Brad Richardson & Malcolm Cohen
Subject:   F2023 interp: CHANGE TEAM to INITIAL_TEAM
Date: 2023-October-18


/Interp declines to accept this interpretation request, as the question
it asks is answered by the text in the standard quoted in 21-216 itself.

That is, the standard says
> The team-values on the active images that execute the CHANGE TEAM
> statement shall be those of team variables defined by corresponding
> executions of the same FORM TEAM statement (11.7.9).

The initial team is not created by execution of any FORM TEAM statement,
so the value returned by GET_TEAM(INITIAL_TEAM) cannot possibly be the
result of executing any FORM TEAM statement.

There is no ambiguity and no defect. No edit to the standard is needed.

Furthermore, I note that the subsequent sentence in the standard:
> When the
> CHANGE TEAM statement is executed, the current team shall be the
> team that was current when those team variables were defined.
has the effect of enforcing a CHANGE TEAM statement execution to always
change the team to be a child of the current team. The initial team is
not a child of any team, so the very idea of CHANGE TEAM(initial team)
would thus violate the design principles of this construct.

Interpretation resolution is a (very expensive) process for fixing defects
in the published standard. It is not appropriate to use this for editorial
changes.

If an editorial change is desired, for example, insertion of a note:

    NOTE
    The initial team is not created by execution of a FORM TEAM statement,
    and therefore CHANGE TEAM cannot be used to change the team to be the
    initial team.

then the recommendation of /Interp is to work with the relevant subgroup,
which in this case is /HPC, to establish whether there is consensus for
such a wording change being desirable.

Finally, /Interp notes that the functionality provided by
    GET_TEAM(INITIAL_TEAM)
enables access, with TEAM= specifiers, to coarrays co-indexed according to
the initial team, without having to exit any nested CHANGE TEAM executions.

===END===