From rz48@rz.uni-karlsruhe.de Fri Feb 7 14:57:38 1997 Received: from nz11.rz.uni-karlsruhe.de (nz11.rz.uni-karlsruhe.de [129.13.64.7]) by dkuug.dk (8.6.12/8.6.12) with ESMTP id OAA17070 for ; Fri, 7 Feb 1997 14:53:00 +0100 Message-Id: <199702071353.OAA17070@dkuug.dk> Received: from ry73.rz.uni-karlsruhe.de by nz11.rz.uni-karlsruhe.de with SMTP (PP); Fri, 7 Feb 1997 14:28:49 +0100 Received: by ry73.rz.uni-karlsruhe.de (1.38.193.4/16.2) id AA07269; Fri, 7 Feb 1997 14:28:47 +0100 Subject: N1249: German National Activity Report To: sc22wg5@dkuug.dk Date: Fri, 7 Feb 1997 14:28:46 +0100 (CET) From: hennecke@rz.uni-karlsruhe.de (Michael Hennecke) Reply-To: hennecke@rz.uni-karlsruhe.de (Michael Hennecke) X-Mailer: ELM [version 2.4 PL23] Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=iso-8859-1 Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit Content-Length: 5612 Here is the German National Activity Report (N1249), submitted on behalf of the DIN working group for Fortran. I will bring copies to the meeting. Thanks, Michael ====================================================================== Michael Hennecke http://www.uni-karlsruhe.de/~Michael.Hennecke/ ---------------------------------------------------------------------- University of Karlsruhe RFC822: hennecke@rz.uni-karlsruhe.de Computing Center (G20.21 R210) No longer on BITNET :-( Zirkel 2 * P.O. Box 69 80 Phone: +49 721 608-4862 D-76128 Karlsruhe Fax: +49 721 32550 ====================================================================== ISO/IEC JTC1/SC22/WG5/N1249 Page 1 of 2 1997-02-07 GERMAN NATIONAL ACTIVITY REPORT ================================= (DIN working group for Fortran) 1. General ---------- Since the July 1996 meeting of WG5 in Dresden, there have been two meetings of the DIN working group (October 1996 and January 1997). Both were held for two days, and were attended by six members of the working group. There are about a dozend active members on the DIN mailing list, most of which come from universities and research centers and represent users of the language. The DIN Fortran working group has repeatedly discussed Fortran's diminishing role in the world of computer programming. When top managers become convinced (how and by whom?) that Fortran is no longer worth being supported or even programmed within their organization, we have a political problem and often an informational deficit. Participation of vendors in the German group is decreasing, partly caused by the fact that none of the vendors do compiler development in Germany any more. When large organizations such as CERN in Geneva and the GMD near Bonn (and others) cease all official activities in Fortran, we should be concerned. Regrettably, Karl-Heinz Rotthaeuser had to give up chairing the DIN working group for such reasons, and we should all be concerned. At its last meeting in January, the DIN working group appointed Wolfgang Walter as its new chairman, and would like to take this opportunity to thank Karl-Heinz Rotthaeuser for his long-term dedication to the Fortran standardization effort. 2. Balloting ------------ Germany has approved both Corrigendum 3 to Fortran 90 and the Draft International Standard for Fortran 95 (YES without comments). The PDTRs on Enhanced Data Type facilities and Floating Point Exception Handling have been reviewed and approved (YES with comments). Most of the comments are editorial. One particular concern is that both PDTRs should contain introductory text which conforms to the procedures set up by WG5 in document N1152. 3. Work on F2000 requirements ----------------------------- The German working group has spent most of its time for the work on F2000 requirements: - the draft PDTR on Interoperability of Fortan and C has been prepared (by the project editor, Michael Hennecke) and reviewed (by the whole group), - the WG5 technical subgroups WG5/data and WG5/misc are led by Manuela Zuern and Christian Weber, who also prepared the base documents for the Las Vegas meeting of WG5, - the DIN working group members participated in these as well as in the WG5/hpc subgroup. - the work for conditional compilation has been informally reviewed. ISO/IEC JTC1/SC22/WG5/N1249 Page 2 of 2 1997-02-07 4. Strategy ----------- Meeting time has mostly been devoted to deciding on DIN's priorities for the F2000 requirements, and to discussions on the strategies which are applied for Fortran standardization. DIN strongly believes that the next standard has to be very convincing and hard to ignore, and that this will definitely be our LAST CHANCE to clean up and complete several major features which were introduced into Fortran 90 in a way which has proved to be too restrictive, incomplete, or otherwise less useful than anticipated. Among these currently unsatisfactory features are - modules and visibility rules, - generic interfaces and overloading rules, - extension operators and operator priorities, - data abstraction facilities in general. Even if we get these features completed in 2002/3, it will be 12 years after they were originally introduced. This stretches the users' patience to the breaking point and causes many users to turn to alternative languages. The DIN working group also expresses its concern about an increasing need for support of low-level language facilities in the area of high performance computing and interoperability with C. Particularly the message passing interface de-facto standard MPI is based on many details of memory layout of user data, and on asynchronous processing. Fortran is currently unable to deal with these issues. For C interoperability, the features which are most urgently needed (in addition to the PDTR) are the support for procedure variables, and the access of Fortran features (esp. data structures, descriptors, ...) from C. DIN strongly recommends that these issues be addressed for the F2000 revision.