17. Naming Conventions

In many cases MPI names for C functions are of the form MPI_Class_action_subset. This convention originated with MPI-1. Since MPI-2 an attempt has been made to standardize the names of MPI functions according to the following rules.

1. In C, all routines associated with a particular type of MPI object should be of the form MPI_Class_action_subset or, if no subset exists, of the form MPI_Class_action. In Fortran, all routines associated with a particular type of MPI object should be of the form MPI_CLASS_ACTION_SUBSET or, if no subset exists, of the form MPI_CLASS_ACTION.


2. If the routine is not associated with a class, the name should be of the form MPI_Action_subset in C and MPI_ACTION_SUBSET in Fortran.


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.