From Miles.Ellis@etrc.ox.ac.uk Thu Apr 30 14:05:08 1998 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 OAA07015 for ; Thu, 30 Apr 1998 14:05:07 +0200 Received: from ermine.ox.ac.uk by oxmail4 with SMTP (PP) with ESMTP; Thu, 30 Apr 1998 13:04:52 +0100 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 NAA26617 for ; Thu, 30 Apr 1998 13:04:51 +0100 (BST) X-Sender: mellis@ermine.ox.ac.uk Message-Id: Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset="us-ascii" Date: Thu, 30 Apr 1998 13:05:33 +0100 To: "WG5 members (list)" From: Miles Ellis Subject: Internationalization in Fortran I have just received a copy of ISO/IEC TR 11017:1998 (Framework for internationalization), which was prepared by WG20 as a guide for other WGs. The TR describes the type of features that might be provided in languages in order to provide i18n facilities. There are, however, only two examples in the whole report of actual example code - both in Fortran! The first example shows how i18n features could be accessed from a Fortran program by the addition of three intrinsic procedures: CULTURAL_ENVIRONMENT which returns a processor-dependent code for the cultural environment specified as an argument REPERTOIRE_KIND which returns the kind type of the character repertoire associated with the current cultural environment SET_ENVIRONMENT which changes the current cultural environment A "cultural environment" is essentially a language-independent "locale" for those familiar with C and POSIX. Once the environment and, if necessary, the character set had been specified then it is assumed that the processor would take care of a range of culturally sensitive issues (such as whether to use a period or a comma as a decimal delimiter, for example). The second example is a sample module which shows how a Fortran program having access to the above three procedures (and their underlying model) might implement culturally sensitive sorting using overloaded relational operators. This assumes the existence of two further intrinsic procedures which provide the functions for generating keys and comparing strings described elswhere in the TR, and which are based on the Canadian Standard for ordering words in a culturally sensitive manner. I would recommend that anyone interested in this topic should get hold of a copy of this TR. In particular, it might be useful for the J3 subgroup developing i18n features for F2000. Miles Miles Ellis Convenor: ISO/IEC JTC1/SC22/WG5 (Fortran) Email: Miles.Ellis@etrc.ox.ac.uk Phone: +44 1865 270528 Fax: +44 1865 270527