(Closes #2612) add support for length and precision attributes in character type

[arporter]

No description provided.

[codecov]

Codecov Report

✅ All modified and coverable lines are covered by tests.
✅ Project coverage is 99.96%. Comparing base (4a0546a) to head (b3553c8).
⚠️ Report is 38 commits behind head on master.

Additional details and impacted files

@@           Coverage Diff            @@
##           master    #3377    +/-   ##
========================================
  Coverage   99.95%   99.96%            
========================================
  Files         389      390     +1     
  Lines       54377    54558   +181     
========================================
+ Hits        54355    54538   +183     
+ Misses         22       20     -2     

☔ View full report in Codecov by Sentry.
📢 Have feedback on the report? Share it here.

🚀 New features to boost your workflow:

• ❄️ Test Analytics: Detect flaky tests, report on failures, and find test suite problems.

[arporter]

This is a little bigger than I'd have liked because, in quite a few tests, we use character as a "type that we don't support". I've kicked this can down the road a bit by switching to complex but we will also want to add support for that soon. Perhaps at that point there will be no basic type that we don't support?

[arporter]

Something goes very wrong in the NEMO ITs:

I don't have a test with len=some_intrinsic(arg)...

[arporter]

I declare this one ready for review too. I haven't yet had a green run on the NEMOv4 integration tests but I've tried it manually and I think it's OK. We can run the ITs once Aidan's benchmarking is done.

[sergisiso]

Thanks @arporter it's good to see additional symbols have a proper datatype. See mostly minor comments but the NEMOv4 integration test has also failed.

[arporter]

Doc test failure was a link to the Tau website that works fine. NEMOv4 IT is now fine but get error (timeout??) on the "speed test" - possibly the string handling has slowed-down the processing of the large file or perhaps the machine was busy.

[arporter]

Anyway, ready for another look now.

[sergisiso]

@arporter This is approved for merging. All the comments have been addressed, and the rough edges of the implementation are captured in #3240. The integration tests all pass, the timeout was due to a busy system.