Subject: SC 22 N 3478 - SC 22/WG 5 Business Plan/Convener's Report

From: Matthew Deane <[email-masked]>
Date: Mon, 19 Aug 2002 11:25:22 -0400

ISO/IEC JTC 1/SC22
Programming languages, their environments and system software interfaces
Secretariat:  U.S.A.  (ANSI)

ISO/IEC JTC 1/SC22 N3478

TITLE:
SC 22/WG 5 Business Plan/Convener's Report 

DATE ASSIGNED:
2002-08-19

SOURCE:
SC 22/WG 5 Convenor (J. Reid)

BACKWARD POINTER:
N/A

DOCUMENT TYPE:
Other document (Open)

PROJECT NUMBER:

STATUS:
Prior arrangement was made by the WG 5 Convenor to submit this report after
the July 26 deadline as WG 5 met 11-16 August 2002, so it 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:  [email-masked]

_____end of cover page, beginning of document______________

                                                 ISO/IEC JTC1/SC22/WG5 N1493

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: [email-masked]

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 INCITS/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 into
the draft on 26 August; 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.

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 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.

22.02.01.05 Type 2 Technical Report on Enhanced Module Facilities

Minor changes have been made during the year. Serious consideration of
this will be made once the first CD of Part 1 is completed.

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 December 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 no 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 INCITS/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. For example, the OpenMP consortium 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.  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, 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 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 INCITS/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 23 members, including
the Convener, representing 6 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 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 be submitted for approval in
February 2003 and a Draft TR will be 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 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 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 John Reid be reappointed for a further term as
Convener. A statement of support has been sent to the secretariat 
by the BSI.

WG5 requests that Dan Nagle be appointed editor of Part 3 of the 
Fortran standard in place of David Epstein. 

WG5 requests that further improvements be made to the SC22 email
reflector system. This matter was raised 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, INCITS/J3, meets quarterly.  Other work is
carried out via email.