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(g77-295.info)GLOBALS

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`GLOBALS'
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     Global name NAME defined at ... already defined...
     Global name NAME at ... has different type...
     Too many arguments passed to NAME at ...
     Too few arguments passed to NAME at ...
     Argument #N of NAME is ...

   These messages all identify disagreements about the global procedure
named NAME among different program units (usually including NAME
itself).

   Whether a particular disagreement is reported as a warning or an
error can depend on the relative order of the disagreeing portions of
the source file.

   Disagreements between a procedure invocation and the *subsequent*
procedure itself are, usually, diagnosed as errors when the procedure
itself *precedes* the invocation.  Other disagreements are diagnosed
via warnings.

   This distinction, between warnings and errors, is due primarily to
the present tendency of the `gcc' back end to inline only those
procedure invocations that are *preceded* by the corresponding
procedure definitions.  If the `gcc' back end is changed to inline
"forward references", in which invocations precede definitions, the
`g77' front end will be changed to treat both orderings as errors,
accordingly.

   The sorts of disagreements that are diagnosed by `g77' include
whether a procedure is a subroutine or function; if it is a function,
the type of the return value of the procedure; the number of arguments
the procedure accepts; and the type of each argument.

   Disagreements regarding global names among program units in a
Fortran program *should* be fixed in the code itself.  However, if that
is not immediately practical, and the code has been working for some
time, it is possible it will work when compiled with the `-fno-globals'
option.

   The `-fno-globals' option causes these diagnostics to all be warnings
and disables all inlining of references to global procedures (to avoid
subsequent compiler crashes and bad-code generation).  Use of the
`-Wno-globals' option as well as `-fno-globals' suppresses all of these
diagnostics.  (`-Wno-globals' by itself disables only the warnings, not
the errors.)

   After using `-fno-globals' to work around these problems, it is wise
to stop using that option and address them by fixing the Fortran code,
because such problems, while they might not actually result in bugs on
some systems, indicate that the code is not as portable as it could be.
In particular, the code might appear to work on a particular system,
but have bugs that affect the reliability of the data without
exhibiting any other outward manifestations of the bugs.