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Date: Thu, 20 May 2004 09:36:59 +0100
From: John Reid <j.k.reid@rl.ac.uk>
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Sally Seitz wrote:
> John,
> 
> In preparing these documents for submission to ISO, I realized that I need
> an abstract from you for the FDIS ballot of 1539, as well as an abstract for
> publication.  Upon the approval of the JTC 1 TR ballot, I will need an
> abstract for 19767 as well.  Attached you will find the explanation of an
> abstract.
> 
> Thanks and best regards,
> Sally


Curses! We prepared one for the CD and sent it to Matt, but no use was made of 
it. I had assumed that this idea had been dropped. What we sent to Matt is 
equally applicable to the DIS and is appended.

Best wishes,

John.


............................................................


               DIS revision of ISO/IEC 1539-1:1997 -
        Programming Language Fortran - Part 1: Base language

                           Abstract

Fortran is a computer language for scientific and technical
programming that is tailored for efficient run-time execution on a wide
variety of processors. It was first standardized in 1966 and the
standard has since been revised three times (1978, 1991, 1997).
The revision of 1991 was major and those of 1978 and 1997 were
relatively minor. This proposed fourth revision is major and has been
made following a meeting of ISO/IEC JTC1/SC22/WG5 in 1997 that
considered all the requirements of users, as expressed through their
national bodies.

The significant enhancements in the 1991 revision were dynamic storage,
structures, derived types, pointers, type parameterization, modules,
and array language. The main thrust of the 1997 revision was in
connection with alignment with HPF (High Performance Fortran).

The major enhancements for this revision are

(1) Derived type enhancements: parameterized derived types, improved
     control of accessibility, improved structure constructors, and
     finalizers.

(2) Object oriented programming support: type extension and inheritance,
     polymorphism, dynamic type allocation, and type-bound procedures.

(3) Data manipulation enhancements: allocatable components, deferred
     type parameters, VOLATILE attribute, explicit type specification in
     array constructors, pointer enhancements, extended initialization
     expressions, and enhanced intrinsic procedures.

(4) Input/output enhancements: asynchronous transfer, stream access,
     user specified transfer operations for derived types, user
     specified control of rounding during format conversions, named
     constants for preconnected units, the flush statement, regularization
     of keywords, and access to error messages.

(5) Procedure pointers.

(6) Support for IEC 60559 (IEEE 754) exceptions.

(7) Interoperability with the C programming language.

(8) Support for international usage: access to ISO 10646 4-byte
     characters and choice of decimal or comma in numeric formatted
     input/output.

(9) Enhanced integration with the host operating system: access to
     command line arguments, environment variables, and processor
     error messages.

In addition, there are numerous minor enhancements.

Except in extremely minor ways, this revision is upwards compatible
with the current standard, that is, a program that conforms to the
present standard will conform to the revised standard.

The enhancements are in response to demands from users and will keep
Fortran appropriate for the needs of present-day programmers without
losing the vast investment in existing programs.


