From owner-sc22wg5 Wed Aug 7 20:34:23 2002 Received: from nameserv.rl.ac.uk (nameserv.rl.ac.uk [130.246.135.129]) by dkuug.dk (8.9.2/8.9.2) with ESMTP id UAA90088 for ; Wed, 7 Aug 2002 20:34:22 +0200 (CEST) (envelope-from jkr@jkr.cc.rl.ac.uk) Received: from jkr.cc.rl.ac.uk (jkr.cc.rl.ac.uk [130.246.8.20]) by nameserv.rl.ac.uk (8.8.8/8.8.8) with ESMTP id TAA12530 for ; Wed, 7 Aug 2002 19:35:06 +0100 Received: (from jkr@localhost) by jkr.cc.rl.ac.uk (8.8.8+Sun/8.8.8) id TAA08905 for SC22WG5@dkuug.dk; Wed, 7 Aug 2002 19:38:46 +0100 (BST) Date: Wed, 7 Aug 2002 19:38:46 +0100 (BST) From: John Reid Message-Id: <200208071838.TAA08905@jkr.cc.rl.ac.uk> To: SC22WG5@dkuug.dk Subject: N1487 Draft (optimistic) Convener's Report MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset="us-ascii" ISO/IEC JTC1/SC22/WG5 N1487 DRAFT WG5 Business Plan and Convener's Report to the ISO/IEC JTC1/SC22 2002 Plenary PERIOD COVERED BY THIS REPORT: August 2001 to August 2002. SUBMITTED BY: Dr John Reid (Convener of ISO/IEC JTC1/SC22/WG5) JKR Associates, 24 Oxford Road, Benson, Wallingford, Oxon OX10 6LX, UK. Phone: +44 1235 446493, Fax: +44 1235 446626, Email: jkr@rl.ac.uk 1 MANAGEMENT SUMMARY 1.1 JTC1/SC22/WG5 Statement of Scope The development and maintenance of ISO/IEC Fortran programming language standards. 1.2 Project Report 1.2.1 Completed Projects The second corrigendum to the current Base language standard was published on 15 June 2002. 1.2.2 Projects Underway 22.02.01.01 Programming Language Fortran - Part 1: Base language The requirements for the next revision of the base Fortran Standard (IS 1539-1:1997), referred to informally as Fortran 2000, were agreed by WG5 at its meeting in Las Vegas, USA, in February 1997. In accordance with WG5's agreed strategic policy, the development of the draft standard was delegated to NCITS/J3, acting as WG5's Primary Development Body. The target date for J3 to deliver the draft standard to WG5 was June 2002 and this was done on 31 May. The draft was reviewed at the joint WG5/J3 meeting in Las Vegas, August 11-16, and a collection of edits was agreed. The editor will commence incorporating these edits in the draft on 26 August and we expect to submit the result for first CD ballot in September. We hope that this will enable balloting to commence in October. The target date for the publication of the revised standard is December 2004. WG5 and its Primary Development Body, J3, have continued to collaborate actively by email. The joint meeting in Las Vegas also permitted good collaboration and was in a format that the committees have not tried before. The processing of interpretations continues, but there are relatively few outstanding defect reports and no further corrigenda are planned. 22.02.03 Programming Language Fortran - Part 3: Conditional Compilation Defect processing has been started and suggested edits are in document WG5 N1409, which was prepared at the meeting in Oulu (August 2000) and will be the subject of an informal letter ballot of WG5 members. All changes are minor except for the omission of a line of text between the DIS and IS. The ISO secretariat has reprinted the document with the line restored (15 Decemeber 2000). It is proposed not to prepare a corrigendum unless other serious defects are found, in which case the changes in N1409 will be included. The editor, David Epstein, is now longer working on Fortran standardization so we wish to request that Dan Nagle, J3 chairman, be appointed to replace him. Dan has written an implementation of this part of the standard using the base language. We anticipate that after the revision of the base language has been published, a minor revision of this part may be appropriate. 1.2.3 Cancelled Projects None. 1.3 Cooperation and Competition WG5 cooperates closely with the ANSI NCITS/J3 Fortran Technical Committee, to whom it has delegated the technical development of Fortran 2000 as well as the maintenance of Fortran 95 (ISO/IEC 1539-1:1997). There is also close contact with the industry-driven HPF and OpenMP Consortia, with several members of the Consortia also being members of J3 and/or WG5. Many of those responsible for the development of commercial Fortran compilers are members of J3 and/or WG5. Other important liaisons are those with IFIP WG2.5 (Numerical Software) and ISO/IEC JTC1/SC22/WG20 (Internationalization). There are no competitive activities. 2 PERIOD REVIEW 2.1 Market Requirements Fortran is still the language of choice for the much scientific and technological programming. The long delay between the release of Fortran 77 and the availability of Fortran 90 compilers, at a time when other languages, such as C and C++, were evolving rapidly, had a significant impact on the use of Fortran, but there are now clear signs that the facilities available in Fortran 90 and Fortran 95 are causing a growing number of scientific and technological users to move towards these latest versions of Fortran. Most vendors have upgraded their Fortran 90 compilers to Fortran 95 and some have incorporated the extensions of TR 15580 and TR 15581. Most major Fortran compiler vendors are represented either on WG5 or its Primary Development Body, NCITS/J3, as are many of the major research establishments that rely on Fortran for their numerical computing. There are also two active email lists for users of Fortran, which provide valuable feedback from users. All these diverse sources are being used to guide the development of the language, both through revisions to the base language Standard, and through other related standards and technical reports. 2.2 Achievements The second corrigendum to the Base Language Standard was published during the year. The next draft of the Fortran standard is essentially ready for CD balloting. Only the mechanical incorporation of agreed edits remains to be done. SC22 may wish to note that the draft recognizes ISO 10646. The ground was prepared in the present standard, which allows vendors to implement more than one kind of character type. The kinds are indexed by an integer type parameter. In the draft revision, there is an intrinsic function that returns the kind value for ISO 10646 when this is supported. 2.3 Resources As elsewhere in the Standardization world, it is becoming increasingly difficult to persuade employers to provide the necessary funding for Standards activity. WG5 delegates most of the technical work involved in developing Standards and Technical Reports to 'development bodies' which are either based on a national Fortran committee, as in the case of NCITS/J3 - the primary development body responsible for development of the revision to the base language standard and its subsequent maintenance, or consist of a (small) multinational group under the leadership of the relevant project editor. WG5 currently has one such active development body, the primary development body, developing standards, and four development bodies monitoring published standards and technical reports for maintenance purposes. WG5 itself carries out much of its discussions via email, with an annual meeting during the summer, and occasional other meetings at critical stages in the development of the base language standard. The meeting in August 2002 was attended by twenty?? members, including the Convener, representing six?? countries. 3 FOCUS FOR NEXT WORK PERIOD 3.1 Deliverables It is anticipated that the revised Part 1 of the Standard will be ready for first CD balloting in September 2002. A joint meeting of WG5 and J3 in Las Vegas, March 30 to April 4 2003, will resolve the ballot comments and it is hoped that J3 will deliver a draft final CD to WG5 in June 2003. WG5 will consider this at its meeting in Dresden, July 28 to August 1 2003, and the development body will prepare the final CD during its August meeting for submission for balloting in September. Work on the Type 2 Technical Report on Enhanced Module Facilities with Project Editor Van Snyder will continue once the first CD of Part 1 is completed. It will be considered by during the months of formal voting on the revised Standard and therefore will not delay it. It is envisaged that a Committee draft TR will submitted for approval in February 2003 and a Draft TR will submitted for approval in February 2004. 3.2 Strategies WG5 operates under a strategic plan described in WG5 Standing Document 4, the latest version of which is WG5 N1349. In particular, the revision of the base Standard, IS 1539-1, is delegated to ANSI NCITS/J3 operating as WG5's Primary Development Body, while the other projects for which WG5 is responsible are handled by other Development Bodies which liaise with the Primary Development Body as required. 3.2.1 Risks As far as possible, WG5 tries to anticipate technical comments during international ballots by holding informal ballots of its members before any documents are submitted for ballot. Nevertheless, unexpected technical comments can always delay the planned schedule. 3.2.2 Opportunities WG5 has made extensive use of email for over a decade to speed up technical development. Since 1995 most documents have been distributed via an official file server in the UK; all documents have been distributed in this way since 1997. An open web site is also used to provide non-technical, and other publicly available, information to interested parties. In addition to speeding up the distribution of documents, the use of electronic distribution and communication systems also provides many other benefits, such as the ability to rapidly carry out informal ballots of the members for various reasons. 3.3 Work Program Priorities WG5's priority activity this year is the development of the Draft revision of the base Fortran language Standard, ISO/IEC 1539-1:1997. It is intended that this work will reach first CD stage by September 2002 and final CD stage by September 2003. 4 OTHER ITEMS 4.1 Action Requested at the Forthcoming SC22 Plenary WG5 requests that CD balloting of the revised Part 1 of the Standard be commenced in October 2002. WG5 requests that further improvements be made to the SC22 email reflector system. I first complained about this at the Nara meeting. SPAM remains a serious problem. In the first six months of 2002, 26 genuine messages were posted out of a total of 145. To give you a flavour, here is the end of the index at the time of writing: 2494: Over 250 Million Fresh Email Addresses For Sale from $2 2495: pennies to protect your family M 2496: Disabled because hibernate is not supported by 2497: Undeliverable mail--"Internet" 2498: Worm Klez.E immunity 2499: Neu exclusive content 2500: Hello,sc22wg5,your password 2501: Phone? 2502: Fw:japanese girl VS playboy 2503: Laura's Choice 2504: PLANET NEWS 2505: Summary of the new features of Fortran 2000 2506: Edits related to Japan's Interpretation Requests We have begun constructing our own index manually. The reflector now accepts messages only from registered senders. The rest come to me. A few are genuine and I forward them. The rest are rejects and I usually get a second message from the reflector after its attempt to contact the sender has failed. This means that members of the list do not get the SPAM, but it is a significant nuisance for me. 4.2 Recent Meetings 2001/7/30-8/3 London, UK 2002/08/11-16 Las Vegas, USA 4.3 Future Meetings 2003/03/30-04/4 Las Vegas, USA (1st CD ballot resolution) 2003/07/28-08/1 Dresden, Germany 2004/04 USA (Final CD ballot resolution) Note that WG5 normally meets annually, with extra meetings being held as/when necessary to process ballot comments or other high priority activities that do not accord with the regular meeting schedule. WG5's Primary Development Body, NCITS/J3, meets quarterly. Other work is carried out via email.