This section defines the rules for MPI language binding in general and for Fortran 77 and ANSI C in particular. Defined here are various object representations, as well as the naming conventions used for expressing this standard. The actual calling sequences are defined elsewhere.
It is expected that any Fortran 90 and C++ implementations use the Fortran 77 and ANSI C bindings, respectively. Although we consider it premature to define other bindings to Fortran 90 and C++, the current bindings are designed to encourage, rather than discourage, experimentation with better bindings that might be adopted later.
Since the word PARAMETER is a keyword in the Fortran language, we use the word ``argument'' to denote the arguments to a subroutine. These are normally referred to as parameters in C, however, we expect that C programmers will understand the word ``argument'' (which has no specific meaning in C), thus allowing us to avoid unnecessary confusion for Fortran programmers.
There are several important language binding issues not addressed by this standard. This standard does not discuss the interoperability of message passing between languages. It is fully expected that many implementations will have such features, and that such features are a sign of the quality of the implementation.