A new home for the BMI documentation

BMI
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8

I just started digging into the Fortran mappings and immediatedly came across the issue of how to define types. All of the other languages can be done as a nice tidy one-liner in the function definition, e.g.

def initialize(self, config_file: str) -> None:

But Fortran requires multiple lines:

function initialize(self, config_file) result(bmi_status)
    class(bmi), intent(out) :: self
    character(len=*), intent(in) :: config_file
    integer :: bmi_status

The other approach (which I don’t really like) is use some kind of pseudo-Fortran, like

function initialize(class(bmi)::self, character(len=*)::config_file) result(integer::bmi_status)

Also, the Fortran spec uses this but C/Python uses self - any preferences?

Thought I’d throw this out here for comments - @mdpiper and @mcflugen I’m looking at you :grinning: - before going down a particular route! We could pop this discussion across to the bmi-map repo if it’s better placed there, but I thought it might be broadly of interest to folks here.