From owner-sc22docs@dkuug.dk Tue Aug 5 16:41:16 2003 Received: (from majordom@localhost) by dkuug.dk (8.12.8p1/8.9.2) id h75EfG4r008305 for sc22docs-domo; Tue, 5 Aug 2003 16:41:16 +0200 (CEST) (envelope-from owner-sc22docs@dkuug.dk) X-Authentication-Warning: ptah.dkuug.dk: majordom set sender to owner-sc22docs@dkuug.dk using -f Received: from email1.ansi.org ([12.15.192.5]) by dkuug.dk (8.12.8p1/8.9.2) with ESMTP id h75EfCEc008300 for ; Tue, 5 Aug 2003 16:41:13 +0200 (CEST) (envelope-from mdeane@ansi.org) Received: by EMAIL1 with Internet Mail Service (5.5.2653.19) id ; Tue, 5 Aug 2003 10:33:10 -0400 Message-ID: From: Matthew Deane To: "'SC 22 Distribution List'" Subject: SC 22 N 3605 - SC 22/WG 5 Business Plan/Convener's Report Date: Tue, 5 Aug 2003 10:33:01 -0400 MIME-Version: 1.0 X-Mailer: Internet Mail Service (5.5.2653.19) Content-Type: text/plain; charset="us-ascii" Sender: owner-sc22docs@dkuug.dk Precedence: bulk ISO/IEC JTC 1/SC22 Programming languages, their environments and system software interfaces Secretariat: U.S.A. (ANSI) ISO/IEC JTC 1/SC22 N3605 TITLE: SC 22/WG 5 Business Plan/Convener's Report DATE ASSIGNED: 2003-08-05 SOURCE: SC 22/WG 5 Convenor (J. Reid) BACKWARD POINTER: N/A DOCUMENT TYPE: Other document (Open) PROJECT NUMBER: STATUS: This document will be reviewed at the upcoming SC 22 Plenary under Agenda Item 8.3. ACTION IDENTIFIER: FYI DUE DATE: N/A DISTRIBUTION: Text CROSS REFERENCE: DISTRIBUTION FORM: Open Matt Deane ANSI 25 West 43rd Street New York, NY 10036 Telephone: (212) 642-4992 Fax: (212) 840-2298 Email: mdeane@ansi.org __end of cover page, beginning of document_____ ISO/IEC JTC1/SC22/WG5 N1538 WG5 Business Plan and Convener's Report to the ISO/IEC JTC1/SC22 2003 Plenary PERIOD COVERED BY THIS REPORT: August 2002 to August 2003. 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 None in this period. 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 2003 (formerly 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 INCITS/J3, acting as WG5's Primary Development Body. After rescheduling in 1999, the target date for the first CD ballot was October 2002 and this was achieved slightly ahead of schedule. The ballot was a Concurrent Registration and Approval Ballot and closed on 27 December. 13 member countries supported registration, 1 (Germany) did not, 1 (France) abstained and 9 countries did not vote. The project was therefore registered at the CD stage. On the CD itself, 10 member countries supported approval without comments, 3 (Japan, UK, USA) supported approval with comments, 1 (Germany) did not support approval, 1 (France) abstained and 9 countries did not vote. WG5 and J3 met jointly in Las Vegas, 30 March to 4 April, considered all the comments, and agreed on how to respond to them. A Disposition of Comments Report was written (ISO/IEC JTC 1/SC22 N3560, alias ISO/IEC JTC1/SC22/WG5 N1520) and the corresponding detailed edits were constructed. The result was considered at another meeting of WG5 in Dresden, 28 July to 1 August) and will be considered at another meeting of J3 (August 18-22). The intention is that only editorial changes or very minor technical changes made from now on. In effect, the content of the new standard has been chosen. It was therefore decided at the Dresden meeting to change the informal name to Fortran 2003, since previous Fortran standards have been named after the year in which the technical content was chosen. It is hoped to submit a Final Committee Draft for ballot at the end of October. We hope that this will enable balloting to commence in November. The target date for the publication of the revised standard is December 2004. The repository of requirements (Standing Document 5) is old (1996). A new repository will be established during the coming year. Items from the old repository will be transferred only by WG5 itself or at the request of countries. WG5 and its Primary Development Body, J3, have continued to collaborate actively by email. The joint meeting in Las Vegas also permitted good collaboration. The processing of interpretations continues, but there are relatively few outstanding defect reports and no further corrigenda are planned. 22.02.01.05 Type 2 Technical Report on Enhanced Module Facilities Full consideration of the TR on Enhanced Module Facilities has been delayed because of the need to give priority to work on the new standard. However, WG5 remains convinced that this is very important in order to avoid 'recompilation cascades' when a single module of a very large program is altered. Good progress was made on this at the Dresden meeting of WG5 and the resulting draft will be polished by J3 at its meetings in August and November. It is hoped that a PDTR will be submitted for balloting in December. The TR does not specify the detailed relationship of its facilities to ISO/IEC 1539-1:1997 (Fortran 95), but the language facilities described are not dependent on new language features introduced in Fortran 2003. 22.02.03 Programming Language Fortran - Part 3: Conditional Compilation Defect processing has started and suggested edits are collected in document WG5 N1519, which was prepared at the meeting in Las Vegas (March 2003). All changes are minor so WG5 proposes not to prepare a corrigendum unless serious defects are found, in which case the changes in N1519 will be included. We anticipate that after the revision of the base language has been published, a minor revision of this part may be appropriate, but work on this has not commenced. 1.2.3 Cancelled Projects None. 1.3 Cooperation and Competition WG5 cooperates closely with the ANSI INCITS/J3 Fortran Technical Committee, to whom it has delegated the technical development of Fortran 2003 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 Architecture Review Board, with several members of the Board also being members of J3 and/or WG5. For example, the OpenMP board has aligned the OpenMP 2.0 Release with Fortran 95. 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), IEEE 754 (Floating-point hardware), and ANSI INCITS/H2 (Data base). There are no competitive activities. 2 PERIOD REVIEW 2.1 Market Requirements Fortran is the language of choice for much scientific, engineering, and economic programming, particularly for very large programs that have evolved over many years. 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. Vendors have upgraded their Fortran 90 compilers to Fortran 95, most of them have incorporated the extensions of TR 15581 (allocatable array extensions), and some have incorporated the extensions of TR 15580 (exception handling and support of IEEE floating-point arithmetic). Most major Fortran compiler vendors are represented either on WG5 or its Primary Development Body, INCITS/J3, as are many of the major research establishments that rely on Fortran for their numerical computing. In addition to vendor-supplied and specific mailing lists, there is an active email list and an active usenet newsgroup 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 next Fortran standard has passed a significant milestone with the completion of the CD ballot and responses to all the comments. SC22 may wish to note that in response to comments from the UK, the draft now provides additional support for ISO 10646 on those processors that implement it: - allow the file format to be specified (to be UTF-8). - reading/writing numeric data to 10646 variables. - reading default character or ASCII data into 10646 variables. - assignment of default character or ASCII variables to 10646 variables. 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 INCITS/J3, 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 March 2003 was attended by 22 members, including the Convener, representing 4 countries; and that in July 2003 was attended by 15 members from 6 countries. 3 FOCUS FOR NEXT WORK PERIOD 3.1 Deliverables It is hoped that the final CD ballot for the revised Part 1 of the Standard will start in November 2003. A joint meeting of WG5 and J3 in Las Vegas, May 2-7 2004, will resolve the ballot comments and it is hoped to deliver a DIS to SC22 for balloting in July 2004. Work on the Type 2 Technical Report on Enhanced Module Facilities with Project Editor Van Snyder will continue in parallel. It is hoped that a PDTR will be submitted for approval in December 2003 and a Draft TR will be delivered to SC22 for balloting in July 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 INCITS/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 activities this year are the development of the revision of the base Fortran language Standard, ISO/IEC 1539-1:1997 and the Type 2 Technical Report on Enhanced Module Facilities. 4 OTHER ITEMS 4.1 Action Requested at the Forthcoming SC22 Plenary WG5 requests that final CD balloting of the revised Part 1 of the Standard be commenced in November 2003 and that PDTR balloting of the TR commence in December 2003. 4.2 Email Reflector WG5 had continuing problems with the SC22 email reflector system during the year, but the system has been changed to specify a separate list of approved senders. Anything not from an approved sender is refused and is not entered in the index, but is forwarded to the convener. Attempts to use other systems were not successful. At the time of writing, mail from one WG5 member is being refused and the convener has to forward his mail to the list. 4.3 Recent Meetings 2002/08/11-16 Las Vegas, USA 2003/03/30-04/04 Las Vegas, USA 2003/07/28-08/01 Dresden, Germany 4.4 Future Meetings 2004/05/2-7 Las Vegas, 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, INCITS/J3, meets quarterly. Other work is carried out via email.