From Miles.Ellis@etrc.ox.ac.uk Sat Feb 22 14:39:31 1997 Received: from oxmail4.ox.ac.uk (oxmail4.ox.ac.uk [163.1.2.33]) by dkuug.dk (8.6.12/8.6.12) with SMTP id OAA27021 for ; Sat, 22 Feb 1997 14:39:24 +0100 Received: from ermine.ox.ac.uk by oxmail4 with SMTP (PP) with ESMTP; Sat, 22 Feb 1997 13:23:04 +0000 Received: from [163.1.85.1] (com1.etrc.ox.ac.uk [163.1.85.1]) by ermine.ox.ac.uk (1.1/8.8.3) with ESMTP id NAA32545 for ; Sat, 22 Feb 1997 13:24:34 GMT X-Sender: mellis@ermine.ox.ac.uk Message-Id: Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset="us-ascii" Date: Sat, 22 Feb 1997 13:28:46 +0000 To: sc22wg5 From: Miles Ellis Subject: Draft announcement about the content of Fortran 2000 As agreed in Las Vegas, the following message is being circulated only to WG5 members for comment at present. IT SHOULD NOT BE FORWARDED TO ANY OTHER EMAIL LISTS, etc. Please let me ahve any comments no later than 0001 GMT on Friday 28th February. I will distribute the final version to various lists later that day. ------------------------------------------------- Subject: The final content of Fortran 2000 is determined! ISO/IEC JTC1/SC22/WG5 (Fortran) met in Las Vegas, Nevada, USA, during the week of 10-14 February, and completed the specification of the content of Fortran 2000. The process began several years ago, when WG5 requested all national member bodies to submit proposals for new features for the world's oldest programming language. Fortran 90 had marked a major change in Fortran, bringing it firmly into the forefront of modern programming languages with such features as modules and user-specified numerical precision, and represented a major enhancement of the language. Fortran 95 (the standard for which will be published later this year) made a number of relatively minor changes and also incorporated all the corrections that had been found necessary after the publication of the Fortran 90 standard. However Fortran 2000 was always expected to be a more major revision. At its meeting in Dresden in July last year WG5 made a start on processing the very many proposals for changes and enhancements to the language and determined that Fortran 2000 should be - A language for high performance numerical, scientific and engineering programming - A modern language with high quality data abstraction and user extensibility features Although a start was made on determining the detailed features that would be added to Fortran in this revision, it was not possible to complete the work and so three electronic subgroups continued to discuss the various issues over the following months. In Las Vegas, therefore, we had comprehensive reports from these subgroups on all the various proposals that had been made, together with their recommendations for how to proceed. Working both in subgroups and in full committee, WG5 carried out a series of votes to determine the relative priorities of the various proposals and finally came up with a set of 12 major new features that would be added to Fortran 95 to create the new Fortran 2000 language. These features are as follows: High Performance Computing: Asynchronous I/O *Floating point exception handling Interval arithmetic Data Abstraction / User Extensibility: *Allocatable components Derived type I/O Object-oriented Fortran: Constructors/destructors Inheritance Polymorphism Parameterized derived types Procedure pointers Other Features: Internationalization *Interoperability with C Note that the three items preceded by an asterisk are already the subject of Work Items intended to produce ISO/IEC Type 3 Technical Reports. The detailed syntax and semantics for these topics will, therefore, be available well in advance of the full revision and it is hoped that they will be incorporated into Fortran 95 compilers. WG5 has undertaken not to alter the syntax or semantics described in the Technical Reports during their inclusion in the Fortran 2000 definition unless experience with early implementations proves this to be necessary. In accordance with its agreed policy, WG5 has delegated the responsibility of preparing the draft CD for Fortran 2000 to its Principal Development Body, the US Fortran Technical Committee - X3J3. Anyone interested in contributing to the development of these features should, therefore, contact the Chair of X3J3, Jerry Wagener to enquire about joining that committee, or otherwise participating in its work. It is the intention of WG5 that the revised standard shall be published no later than November 2002. (Whether it will be known as Fortran 2000, Fortran 2002, or something else has yet to be agreed!) WG5 has also authorised X3J3 to work on a number of other relatively minor technical enhancements for incorporation in Fortran 2000, subject to the proviso that any work carried out on them does not adversely affect any of the work required to address the major items listed above. In other words, there is no guarantee that any of them will appear in Fortran 2000. However, WG5 has determined that nothing that is not on the above list of new features, or on the following list of minor technical enhancements, will appear in Fortran 2000. The possible minor enhancements are: Access to status error messages in text form Allowing PUBLIC entities to have PRIVATE type Access to command line arguments Derived type encapsulation feature Enhanced complex constants Extending max/min intrinsics to character Extended initialization expressions Generic rate_count in system_clock IEEE I/O rounding inquiry intrinsics Increased statement length Intent for pointer arguments Lower case syntax elements Named scratch files Passing specific/generic names as arguments PUBLIC and PRIVATE derived type components Renaming defined operators Specifying pointer lower bounds Stream I/O VOLATILE attribute It is not intended to give more detail here of these minor technical enhancements, since there is no guarantee that any of them will actually be incorporated into Fortran 2000. WG5 will review the list at every meeting in the light of information provided by X3J3 regarding the progress on the major items for Fortran 2000, and may reduce it if it feels that this will be necessary in order to meet the publication schedule for the main standard. Anyone with a particular interest in any of these minor enhancements, however, should contact the Chair of X3J3, Jerry Wagener as only by joining X3J3 and volunteering to work on the relevant item(s) will it be possible to influence their possible inclusion in Fortran 2000. Any other queries about Fortran 2000 should be directed to either your national Fortran standards committee, or to the Convenor of the ISO Fortran Working Group, whose personal details appear at the end of this announcement: Dr Miles Ellis Convenor: ISO/IEC JTC1/SC22/WG5 (Fortran) ------------------------------------------------------------ Dr Miles Ellis Director: Educational Technology Resources Centre University of Oxford, 37 Wellington Square, Oxford OX1 2JF, ENGLAND Telephone: +44 1865 270528 Fax: +44 1865 270527 Email: Miles.Ellis@etrc.ox.ac.uk WWW: http://www.etrc.ox.ac.uk/Personal/Miles/Miles_Ellis.html