From adt10@amdahl.uts.amdahl.com Fri Apr 24 02:33:58 1992 Received: from mcsun.EU.net by dkuug.dk via EUnet with SMTP (5.64+/8+bit/IDA-1.2.8) id AA24225; Fri, 24 Apr 92 02:33:58 +0200 Received: from CHARON.AMDAHL.COM by mcsun.EU.net with SMTP id AA08062 (5.65b/CWI-2.159); Fri, 24 Apr 1992 02:34:05 +0200 Received: from amdahl.uts.amdahl.com by charon.amdahl.com (4.0/SMI-4.1/DNS) id AA07061; Thu, 23 Apr 92 17:34:03 PDT Received: by amdahl.uts.amdahl.com (/\../\ Smail3.1.14.4 #14.9) id ; Thu, 23 Apr 92 17:33 PDT Message-Id: Date: Thu, 23 Apr 92 17:33 PDT From: adt10@uts.amdahl.com (Andrew D. Tait) To: sc22wg5@dkuug.dk Subject: Joint X3J3/WG5 Meetings X-Charset: ASCII X-Char-Esc: 29 Jerry's proposal assumes that X3J3 is going to be the primary development organization in the revision of Fortran 90. In other words "business as usual". Regardless of what X3J3 has said and X3 may wish it is no longer clear to me that this is the most effective way to proceed as must be obvious from my comments on the wg5l12 proposal. I have advocated a radically new approach (only partially developed I admit) but we must ensure that we make much more effective use of ALL the available resources in revising Fortran 90 than we did in producing Fortran 90. I do not assume that most of the development work has to be done by X3J3, on the contrary I hope for greater participation from other national bodies because that brings more resources to bear on the problem. It is therefore not appropriate to talk in terms of joint X3J3/WG5 meetings: a better, but clumsier, term would be "joint National Body/WG5" meetings which equates to simply WG5! Firstly we have to decide how we should approach the revision of Fortran 90. THEN we devise a schedule of meetings which will enable us to achieve the objective. The schedule should address the needs of the whole organization working on the revision. As I have said before with one meeting a year WG5 cannot manage anything. Over the past ten or fifteen years standards organizations have lost a lot of credibilty because of their inability to respond to the needs of their user communities in a timely fashion (and that would seem to be the least of their problems). We need to apply a more business like approach to the development of standards and we (i.e. those of us who want to participate in the revison of Fortran 90) have an excellent opportunity to set the pace for the standards community. Don't let us waste it by blindly following the path we have taken before. Andrew D. Tait **************************************************************************