From Miles.Ellis@Educational-Technology-Resources-Centre.oxford.ac.uk Thu Sep 28 11:42:30 1995 Received: from oxmail3.ox.ac.uk (oxmail3.ox.ac.uk [163.1.2.9]) by dkuug.dk (8.6.12/8.6.12) with ESMTP id LAA21115 for ; Thu, 28 Sep 1995 11:42:15 +0100 Received: from vax.ox.ac.uk (actually host vax) by oxmail3 with SMTP (PP); Thu, 28 Sep 1995 11:40:46 +0100 Received: from 163.1.85.1 by vax.ox.ac.uk (MX V4.1 VAX) with SMTP; Thu, 28 Sep 1995 11:40:54 +0100 X-Sender: MELLIS@vax.ox.ac.uk Message-ID: MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset="us-ascii" Date: Thu, 28 Sep 1995 11:45:16 +0100 To: sc22wg5 From: Miles.Ellis@Educational-Technology-Resources-Centre.oxford.ac.uk (Miles Ellis) Subject: SC22 Plenary Dear WG5 members, I attended last week's Plenary meeting of SC22 as Convenor of WG5 which made a number of decisions directly relevant to WG5, as well as some others which are indirectly relevant. I shall produce a more comprehensive report for the November meeting in San Diego, but I thought that you would all like to know the essentials now. The published resolutions will be renumbered and, in some cases, re-ordered so the temporary numbering shown below (actually lettering ;-) is that used during the meeting itself. The resolutions that directly relate to Fortran are as follows, with comments on them added by me and enclosed between double angle brackets: Resolution AD: Revision of Synchronization Plans ------------------------------------------------ ISO/IEC JTC1/SC22 directs WG4 (COBOL), WG5 (Fortran), WG14 (C) and WG15 (POSIX) to review their respective synchronization plans and recommend to the 1996 SC22 Plenary appropriate changes in light of revised JTC1 balloting procedures and any changes in working group practices. << This will be an action item for San Diego. It primarily relates to the new DIS procedures and their effect on synchronisation with ANSI balloting. >> Resolution AE: Appointment of project editors --------------------------------------------- ISO/IEC JTC1/SC22 confirms the appointment of the following project editors: Dr. Lawrie Schonfelder, for project 22.02.02 - Revision of ISO 1539-2 - Varying Length Character String Module Mr. John Reid, for project 22.02.01.02 - TR (Type 2) on Floating Point Exception Handling Dr. Miles Ellis, for project 22.02.01.03 - TR (Type 2) on Interoperability between Fortran and C Mr. Malcom Cohen, for project 22.02.01.04 - TR (Type 2) on Enhanced Derived Type Facilities Dr. Jonathan Hodgson, for project 22.22.02 - Prolog Modules Mr. John Nicholls, for project 22.45 - Z Specification Language Mr. John Dawes, for project 22.47.1 PCTE Parts 1, 2 and 3; project 22.47.2 PCTE Object Orientation Extensions; project 22.47.3 PCTE Fine Grain Extensions; and project 22.47.4 C++ binding to PCTE. Mr. Tony Hetherington, for project 22.19 - Pascal. Mr. Ken Dritz, as co-project editor for project 22.10.04 - Ada complex types and functions, and for project 22.10.05 - Ada complex elementary functions. << See also resolutions AF and AG, below >> Resolution AF: Subdivision of Fortran work item ----------------------------------------------- ISO/IEC JTC1/SC22 - authorizes the subdivision of project 22.02.01 - programming language Fortran as follows: 22.02.01.01 - Programming language Fortran 22.02.01.02 - TR (Type 2) - Floating Point Exception Handling 22.02.01.03 - TR (Type 2) - Interoperability between Fortran and C 22.02.01.04 - TR (Type 2) - Enhanced Derived Type Facilities - acknowledges that WG5's objective for the TR's is to gain experience with the subjects before their incorporation in a future revision of Fortran (Fortran 2000) - agrees with WG5's intent to avoid gratuitous, or unnecessary, changes to the technical specification when the TR's are integrated into the revision in order to minimize impact on implementors of these features. This intention should be reflected in WG5 internal process documents - instructs WG5 to confirm the scope of the TR on enhanced derived type facilities at its November 1995 meeting and report any changes to SC22. << The last three bulleted items were agreed by myself and the US delegation after discussion with the Chair of X3J3 in order to allay the doubts expressed by some members of X3J3. In particular, the question of the inclusion of parameterised derived types in the third TR has been a contentious issue for many X3J3 members - and hence for the US delegation acting on the instructions of X3J3. The scope of all the TRs approved is as requested by WG5, and the US delegation agreed that if WG5 confirms its desire to include parameterised derived types in the TR at its meeting in San Diego, where there will, presumably, be a substantial US delegation (unlike Tokyo) then that would be acceptable and there will be no further complaints from X3J3. On the other hand, if WG5 decides that, after due consideration, parameterised derived types should be deferred until Fortran 2000 rather than being the subject of a TR, then the change in the scope of the TR will be accepted by SC22 without any further action being required. This will, therefore, be an action item in San Diego. >> Resolution AG: Revision of ISO 1539-2 - Varying Length Character String Module ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ ISO/IEC JTC1/SC22 approves WG5's request to revise the informative annex of ISO/IEC 1539-2 - Fortran varying length character string module, for alignment with ISO/IEC 1539-1:1995. << Although Lawrie Schonfelder has, as most of you will know, withdrawn from standards work due to the pressure of University commitments, he has very generously agrred to revise the module which he wrote as part of 1539-2 to take advantage of the various features in Fortran 95, once that revision has been approved. >> The other major item to affect WG5 was related to electronic distribution and the use of the World Wide Web. The entire Plenary went into Ad Hoc mode on Wednesday to discuss electronic distribution at interminable length (i.e. all day!), and then the majority continued for a couple of hours on Thursday, while the remainder, including me, took part in an Ad Hoc on the use of the World Wide Web. The main conclusion from the first discussions was that the JTC1 "Guidelines" are quite inappropriate for SC22. These, you will no doubt recollect, call for documents to be distributed on MS-DOS formatted diskettes in RTF, MS-Word or WordPerfect formats. SC22 was quite clear that diskettes were not appropriate and preferred a combination of email and ftp, while there was little enthusiasm for any of the formats recommended by JTC1 - the favourite options being ASCII/email for shorter documents, and PostScript for longer ones. By an amazing coincidence (?) this was exactly what the survey that I carried out amongst the WG5 membership wanted for our non-paper distribution! Another strongly recommended format - although not one which is currently much used - was Acrobat (PDF), which combines many of the advantages of PostScript with the ability to read the document on the screen and, within limits, to modify its layout. PDF stands for PostScript Distribution Format, I believe, and it is designed for document DISTRIBUTION, as opposed to just printing. Acrobat Readers are both free and freely distributable, so I shall experiment with the possibility of using this as a means of distributing WG5 documents in a more flexible form than pure PostScript. If anyone has any experience of using Acrobat I would be glad to hear of it. More on this later. One of the objectives of the Ad Hoc was to draw up a position paper for the SC22 delegation to a special JTC1meeting on the topic of electronic distribution which is being held in New York next month. I will let you all know the outcome of this when I hear more. The World Wide Web Ad Hoc was mainly concerned with procedures, as everyone agreed that its use was a god idea. More discussions on this topic will be carried out electronically over the next couple of months, with a view to providing guidelines early next year. Broadly speaking, the plan is to have an official SC22 home page, with various official pages linked to it. One set of such pages will relate to the individual Working Groups and will contain the formal details of each WG, together with a link to that WG's home page if one exists - and it is hoped that all WGs will establish their own pages if they have not already done so. Each WG's own pages will be its own responsibilty and, although guidelines will be prepared, they may take whatever form the WG wishes. The only change that will be appropriate for our pages concerns links to commercial organisations. The general view was that official WG pages should not contain direct links to commercial pages, but that where these were felt to be appropriate they should be linked via the editor's personal page or some similar form of indirection. Since our pages do currently contain links to Fortran suppliers, etc, I shall make appropriate changes in the near future. Provisionally, I intend to create a page caled "Fortran links" (or something like that) which will be a personal page containing links to any Fortran-related pages of which I am aware, and will carry appropriate disclaimers. There will be a single link to that page from the main WG5 page (as well as from my own personal page). If anyone has any views on this, or suggested sites to link to in this way, please let me know. I shall include all this, and more, in a report on the Pleanary which will be distributed at a later date. Miles Ellis Convenor: WG5 ======================================================================= Dr Miles Ellis CCCCCCCCCCC Director: Educational Technology Resources Centre C C University of Oxford, 37-41 Wellington Square C E Oxford OX1 2JF, ENGLAND C T C R Telephone: +44 1865 270528 Fax: +44 1865 270527 C C Email: Miles.Ellis@etrc.ox.ac.uk CCCCCCCCCCC =======================================================================