2.2. Naming Conventions

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.

MPI identifiers are limited to 30 characters (31 with the profiling interface). This is done to avoid exceeding the limit on some compilation systems.