Subject: N 4083 - Business Plan and Convenor's Report for WG 5

From: Sally Seitz <[email-masked]>
Date: Tue, 18 Jul 2006 10:09:46 -0400

ISO/IEC JTC 1/SC22 
Programming languages, their environments and system software interfaces 

Secretariat:  U.S.A.  (ANSI) 

ISO/IEC JTC 1/SC22 N4083

TITLE: 
Business Plan and Convenor's Report for WG 5
  
DATE ASSIGNED: 
2006-07-18 
  
SOURCE: 
WG 5 Convenor (J. Reid) 
  
BACKWARD POINTER: 
  
DOCUMENT TYPE: 
Officer's Contribution 

PROJECT NUMBER: 

STATUS: 
This document is circulated for review and consideration.  It will be
discussed at the September 2006 SC 22 Plenary in London under agenda item
8.3.  

ACTION IDENTIFIER: 

ACT 

DUE DATE: 
N/A 

DISTRIBUTION: 
Text 

CROSS REFERENCE: 

DISTRIBUTION: 
def

Sally Seitz 
Program Manager 
American National Standards Institute 
25 West 43rd Street, 4th Floor 
New York, NY 10036 
Tel: 212 642 4918 
Fax: 212 840 2298
_________end of cover sheet, beginning of document___________
ISO/IEC JTC1/SC22/WG5 N1662 

WG5 Business Plan and Convener's Report to the ISO/IEC JTC1/SC22 2006
Plenary

PERIOD COVERED BY THIS REPORT: August 2005 to July 2006.

SUBMITTED BY: John Reid  

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 primary responsibility for maintenance of Fortran 2003 has been
delegated to INCITS/J3. Our procedure is that each interpretation 
request is first considered by J3. Once a response has been 
agreed at a J3 meeting, a J3 letter ballot is held, and if this is 
successful it is followed by an informal WG5 vote. A vote is deemed to 
have failed if there are any no votes with reasons that have not so far 
been considered. This gives plenty of scope for detailed analysis and 
gives the result good credibility. 

The first corrigendum was published as ISO/IEC 1539-1:2004(E)/Cor.1:2006(E),
but unfortunately it had been completely reformatted by ITTF, losing the
distinction in the standard between Roman and italic fonts.  Further,
there were arbitrary changes between Roman and italic fonts in the
accompanying text which gave the document an untidy, unprofessional
look.  After correspondence between the WG5 convener, SC22 Secretariat
and ITTF, it was agreed to reissue the Corrigendum in the format
originally submitted, which has not happened at the time of writing,
and to publish the next Fortran Corrigendum in the style which WG5 has
used consistently for several years.

ITTF claimed that WG5 had not followed the formatting guidelines for
Corrigenda but we have not been able to find any such.  We note
that recent published technical corrigenda for Ada, C, Cobol, Fortran, 
Posix and SQL all display styles which are different from each other.

By the end of the May 2006 meeting of INCITS/J3, 22 further 
interpretations had passed all our stages and the second corrigendum
was prepared. However, some very minor technical changes were made at the
last minute, so a further informal WG5 vote was taken, which resulted in
one change. Corrigendum 2 was sent to the Secretariat on 17 July 2006. 

It was agreed at the May 2004 meeting of WG5 that the next revision 
should be minor (as was Fortran 95 as a revision of Fortran 90) with 
a target publication date of 2009. WG5 is already committed to including
the enhanced module facilities of ISO/IEC TR 19767:2005. A Repository of 
Requirements (Standing Document 5) was established and revised several
times;
the latest version is ISO/IEC JTC1/SC22/WG5 N1649. It should be read in
conjunction with ISO/IEC JTC1/SC22/WG5 N1656, which is an annex explaining
how items have been modified or merged in the course of processing by 
INCITS/J3. 

The repository items were considered at the meeting of WG5 in February 2006
and the decisions are recorded in ISO/IEC JTC1/SC22/WG5 N1653, resolution
F5. A few significant items were left to be included if INCITS/J3 found time

after working of first priority items. At its May meeting, INCITS/J3
decided that two items, data type BITS and intelligent macros, were 
sufficiently developed to include, but that further interoperability with C
was not and would be better as a Type 2 Technical Report. 

WG5 is therefore submitting requests for two new work items: revision of 
the Fortran Standard and a Type 2 Technical Report. 

For the full list of selected items, see
          http://j3-fortran.org/doc/year/06/06-010r2.pdf

22.02.01.02 Type 2 Technical Report on Exception Handling

The features of the TR on Exception Handling have been incorporated
in the base Fortran Standard ISO/IEC 1539-1:2004(E), so no maintenance
of this TR is being undertaken. 

22.02.01.04 Type 2 Technical Report on Enhanced Data Type Facilities

The features of the TR on Enhanced Data Type Facilities have been 
incorporated in the base Fortran Standard ISO/IEC 1539-1:2004(E), so no 
maintenance of this TR is being undertaken. 

22.02.01.05 Type 2 Technical Report on Enhanced Module Facilities

The TR on Enhanced Module Facilities is now in a maintenance stage. 
There has been no activity during the period.  

22.02.02 Programming Language Fortran - Part 2: Varying Length
Character Strings

Features of Fortran 2003 cover almost all the requirements for which
Part 2 was written. However, no compilers are available yet.  Therefore, 
WG5 continues to have responsibility for maintenance. There has been 
no activity during the period. 

22.02.03 Programming Language Fortran - Part 3: Conditional
Compilation

There appears to be very little interest in Part 3 and there have
been few implementations.  WG5 continues to have responsibility for 
maintenance, but there has been no activity during the period. It
expects to recommend withdrawal when renewal is next considered.  

1.2.3 Projects Withdrawn

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 as well as the maintenance of Fortran 2003 (ISO/IEC
1539-1:2004(E)). 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.

Dan Nagle (J3 chairman) attended the meeting of the Other Working 
Group on Vulnerabilities, 26-27 June 2006, Washington, DC USA, and
is liaising with WG5 on this matter. 

Other important liaisons are those with IFIP WG2.5 (Numerical
Software), IEEE 754 (Floating-point hardware),  ANSI INCITS/H2 
(Data base), and ANSI INCITS/J11 (C).

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 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 have begun implementing
the new features of Fortran 2003.

Most major Fortran compiler vendors are represented either on WG5 or
its Primary Development Body, INCITS/J3, as are two of the major
research establishments that rely on Fortran for their scientific
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 main achievement during the period has been the choice of which
features to include in the next revision (see section 1.2.2) and
their development to the point of full sets of edits to the present
standard.  

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.  The number of employers, especially among compiler
vendors, has declined through corporate mergers and 
acquisitions. 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 three 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, usually during the summer, and occasional other meetings 
at critical stages in the development of the base language standard. The
meeting in February 2006 was attended by 20 members, including the Convener,

representing 6 member bodies.

3 FOCUS FOR NEXT WORK PERIOD

3.1 Deliverables

It is envisaged that the third corrigendum for Part 1 will be
submitted in the summer of 2007.

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.

3.2.3 Work Program Priorities

WG5's priority activities this year are the maintenance of the base
Fortran language Standard, ISO/IEC 1539-1:2004(E) and the development
of a draft revision that included the items chosen from the Repository 
(see Section 1.2.2).

4.  ADMINISTRATIVE INFORMATION

4.1  WG5 Liaisons

See Section 1.3.

4.2 Recent Meetings

2004/05/02-07  Las Vegas, USA
2005/05/9-13   Delft, Netherlands 
2006/02/13-17  George Mason University, Fairfax VA, USA 

4.3 Future Meetings

2007/08/6-10  London, UK
2008/02/?     Las Vegas (probably), USA
2008/08/?     Las Vegas (probably), USA

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.

5.  SC22 PLENARY ACTIONS RELATED TO WG5

5.1 The final stages of publication of standards

WG5 would like to remind SC22 that is passed this resolution last year:

...................................
Resolution 05-06: Document Submission to ITTF

JTC 1/SC 22 notes that its project editors have been having substantial 
problems with the publication process.  For example, in a number of recent 
publications, internal bookmarks were removed, rendering the documents 
difficult to navigate.

JTC 1/SC 22 instructs its Secretariat to request the ITTF to allow the 
following mode of processing to be applied at the request of the project 
editor before publication of a JTC 1/SC 22 standard, TR, or corrigendum.
1. The project editor sends the approved format file (currently PDF)
   together with any additional source files necessary for ITTF to note
   and verify changes.
2. The ITTF lists the changes it requires.
3. The project editor constructs a new approved format and source files and
   sends them.
4. Steps 2. and 3. are repeated until no changes are needed.
The purpose of this procedure is to improve the quality of the final
document.

Unanimous
....................................

Despite this resolution, WG5 had difficulties with its Corrigendum, see
1.2.2.
WG5 requests that this procedure be commenced forthwith. 

5.2 Free Availability of Documents

WG5 would like to remind SC22 that is passed this resolution last year:

....................................
Resolution 05-02: Free Availability of JTC 1/SC 22 Documents

JTC 1/SC 22 requests the following JTC 1/SC 22 documents be made freely 
available via the ISO On-Line Store: 

Technical Reports
ISO/IEC TR 15580: 2001, Programming languages Fortran - Floating-Point 
           Exception Handling, Type 2 TR, Second edition
ISO/IEC TR 15581: 2001, Programming languages Fortran - Enhanced Data 
           Type Facilities, Type 2 TR, Second edition
ISO/IEC TR 19767: 2005, Enhanced Module Facilities in Fortran, Type 2 TR
ISO/IEC TR 18015, C++ Performance, Type 3 TR

Standard
ISO/IEC 10967 (Parts 1, 2), Language Independent Arithmetic

Upon publication: 
Technical Corrigendum
ISO/IEC 1539:2004, Programming languages Fortran: COR1

Standard
ISO/IEC 10967 (Part 3), Language Independent Arithmetic

JTC1/SC 22, noting JTC 1 Sendai Resolution 32, instructs its Secretariat to
take 
necessary administrative actions to make these documents freely available.

Unanimous 
....................................

The Fortran corrigendum is available free of change, but the three Fortran
TRs 
are not. 

5.3 New Work Item - revision of Part 1 the Fortran Standard

WG5 requests approval of this work item, see 1.2.2.

5.4 New Work Item - Type 2 TR on Further interoperability with C

WG5 requests approval of this work item, see 1.2.2.

Sally Seitz
Program Manager
American National Standards Institute
25 West 43rd Street, 4th Floor
New York, NY 10036
Tel: 212 642 4918
Fax: 212 840 2298