Why separate TYPE and CLASS keywords in modern Fortran?

Fortran developers are prototyping separate TYPE and CLASS keywords to improve code simplicity and robustness, with LFortran already implementing a templates/generics prototype for comparison. The initiative aims to gather community feedback and potentially push for implementation in Flang and GFortran, despite concerns that AI may dominate future Fortran code writing.

Yes, we are starting soon Btw, this is precisely the feedback we’ll need — LFortran already has the other templates/generics prototype we’ll improve it also and we’ll be able to see both side by side and then we can collect feedback and iterate. And if people really like it, we’ll push also for Flang / GFortran implementation. So I am very excited about it. There are bunch of other features we can now prototype also. The only downside is that probably going forward AI will be doing most the Fortran code writing. But I still want to read it, and we still need to debug it, so I think if the feature makes the code simpler, more robust, easier to debug, less bugs, then I think we still want that.