From Miles.Ellis@etrc.ox.ac.uk Sat Mar 1 15:48:15 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 PAA04099; Sat, 1 Mar 1997 15:48:10 +0100 Received: from ermine.ox.ac.uk by oxmail4 with SMTP (PP) with ESMTP; Sat, 1 Mar 1997 14:47:58 +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 OAA20654; Sat, 1 Mar 1997 14:47:57 GMT X-Sender: mellis@ermine.ox.ac.uk Message-Id: Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset="us-ascii" Date: Sat, 1 Mar 1997 14:48:26 +0000 To: sc22 From: Miles Ellis Subject: The final content of Fortran 2000 is determined! Cc: sc22wg5 , comp-fortran-90 , bcs-fsg , ukfortran This announcement is being sent to multiple lists. Please accept my apologies for any resulting duplication. ============================================================================== 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. This will be a major development of the Fortran language which will provide many important benefits for high performance, scientific and engineering users. The process began several years ago, when WG5 requested all national member bodies to submit proposals for new features for the next revision of the Fortran 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) added a number of high performance features, made a number of relatively minor additional changes, and also incorporated those corrections that had been found necessary after the publication of the Fortran 90 standard. The many requests for further extensions and new features made it clear that Fortran 2000 would, however, be a 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, Scientific and Engineering Computing: Asynchronous I/O (see N1189 item #52) *Floating point exception handling (see N1231) Interval arithmetic (see N1189 item #62) Data Abstraction / User Extensibility: *Allocatable components (see N1230) Derived type I/O (see N1189 item #17) Object-oriented Fortran: Constructors/destructors (see N1189 item #89) Inheritance (see N1189 item #88 and N1272) Polymorphism (see N1189 item #88 and N1272) Parameterized derived types (see N1189 item #14) Procedure pointers (see N1189 item #43) Other Features: Internationalization (see N1268 and N1273) *Interoperability with C (see N1237) Note that the three items preceded by an asterisk are already the subject of Work Items intended to produce ISO/IEC Type 2 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. The references shown after each item are the relevant WG5 papers, which are available from the following ftp servers: ftp.nag.co.uk/sc22wg5 ftp.ncsa.uiuc.edu/sc22wg5/ftp.nag.co.uk ftp.dfrc.nasa.gov/pub/x3j3 However, it should be noted that these are, in general, working papers and do not contain complete proposals, syntax or semantics. It should also be noted that N1189 is the (archival) WG5 Repository of Requirements (Standing Document 5). Further information can be obtained from your national Fortran Committee, or directly from the WG5 Convenor or the Chair of X3J3, both of whose email addreesses appear later in this announcement. 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. These possible minor enhancements are: Access to status error messages in text form Allowing PUBLIC entities to have PRIVATE type Access to command line arguments and environment variables 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 Mixed 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 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