Newsgroups: bit.listserv.vfort-l
Date:         Thu, 20 Aug 1992 19:05:00 -0800
From:         Len Moss <LJM@SLACVM.BITNET>
Subject:      Trip Report on WG5 and X3J3 meetings, 27 Jul - 7 Aug, 1992

 S L A C  M E M O R A N D U M                      August 20, 1992
 ____________________________


 To:       Interested FORTRAN users

 From:     L. Moss

 Subject:  Trip Report on WG5 and X3J3 meetings, 27 Jul - 7 Aug,
           1992
 _________________________________________________________________


    NOTE:  This is a personal report of these meetings and in no
 sense does it constitute an official record.


       WG5 MEETING
       ___________

 The international Fortran standards committee, ISO/IEC
 JTC1/SC22/WG5, met in Victoria, British Columbia from 27 through
 31 July 1992.

 MANAGEMENT PLAN
 At this meeting, WG5 formally adopted a plan for managing future
 Fortran standards work.  This plan, which has been developed over
 the past year by a WG5 subgroup, divides the work of revising
 Fortran and producing auxiliary standards (i.e., Fortran-related
 standards, such as the varying length character string module
 currently in the works) between a requirements body (WG5 itself)
 and various development bodies.  The requirements body will
 determine what functionality will be incorporated into a given
 revision or auxiliary standard, and the development body will
 then integrate the required functionality into a complete
 language design and draft the actual document.

 The body working on the revision of the Fortran standard itself
 is designated the primary development body.  In a separate
 resolution, WG5 requested that X3J3 take on this responsibility,
 provided it can arrange in a timely fashion to do so under X3's
 new "I project" procedures (which should avoid some of the
 procedural headaches that plagued the Fortran 90 effort).  Work
 on auxiliary standards may also be assigned to the primary
 development body, or may be assigned to some other group (for
 example, the German standards body, DIN, has been acting in this
 capacity for the string module).  However, these other
 development bodies are expected to coordinate their work with the
 primary development body, to a greater or lesser extent depending
 on the nature of their projects.

 The plan also lays out a schedule.  A minor revision is to be
 produced in the 1995-6 time frame, with emphasis on
 clarifications, corrections, and, if time permits, a few small
 enhancements.  At the same time, work is to begin in parallel on
 a major revision to appear around the turn of the millennium.
 Requirements for the major revision will be collected over the
 next two years and refined the following year; thus the main new
 features of Fortran 2000 will be determined by 1995.

 This management plan was adopted as WG5 Standing Document 4.  It
 is intended to be a living document that can be further refined
 as future experience warrants.

 FORTRAN 90 MAINTENANCE
 Maintenance of Fortran 90 has been hampered up until now by
 conflicts in the international and US procedures.  For example,
 X3 has a well-defined procedure for requesting and issuing formal
 interpretations of the standard, but, until quite recently, no
 mechanism for correcting outright errors (typos, internal
 inconsistencies, etc.)  other than the full revision cycle.
 JTC1, on the other hand, had procedures for issuing both
 technical corrigenda (i.e., to fix typos, clarify confusing
 language, and correct minor, inadvertent errors) and amendments
 (for more substantial changes), but no formal mechanism for
 providing guidance to implementers and users on how to interpret
 the often complex language of the standard.  Both JTC1 and X3,
 however, are in the process of revising their maintenance
 procedures, and it appears that the result may be much more
 usable and useful.

 Despite this progress, a number of members felt that attempting
 to produce technical corrigenda or amendments would be
 inefficient.  Instead, they proposed saving all changes to the
 text of the standard for the upcoming minor revision, and in the
 meantime using more informal channels, such as X3J3's internal
 maintenance standing document, X3J3/S20, to provide rapid
 feedback to the Fortran community on the resolution of defect
 reports.  After considerable discussion, WG5 agreed to pursue
 publication of official technical corrigenda, partly in an
 attempt to make the new procedures work the way we think they
 should, and partly to provide implementers with secure legal
 footing as soon as possible.  Accordingly, WG5 asked X3J3 to
 submit a list of completed interpretations, clarifications, and
 minor corrections following its November 1992 meeting.  WG5 will
 conduct letter ballots on these items, and then forward those on
 which consensus is reached for further processing as technical
 corrigenda.  It is intended that this process should be repeated
 approximately annually as necessary.

 There was no interest expressed in publishing more substantial
 corrections as official amendments; instead, these will be
 included in future revisions of the standard.

 During this meeting, a WG5 subgroup spent a good deal of time
 reviewing a number of specific interpretation, clarification, and
 correction issues.  The results of this review were forwarded to
 X3J3.


       X3J3 MEETING
       ____________

 The week following the WG5 meeting,  3-7 August 1992, the
 corresponding US committee, X3J3, met in Bellvue, Washington.  I
 acted as head of the Data Concepts subgroup at this meeting.

 STATUS OF THE US FORTRAN 90 STANDARD
 Although Fortran 90 has been an official international standard
 (ISO/IEC 1539 : 1991) for some time now, the corresponding US
 standard (X3.198) is still being held up by procedural
 difficulties.  Final action by ANSI's Board of Standards Review
 (BSR) had been expected during the course of this X3J3 meeting.
 However, on Friday morning it was learned that this action had
 not been considered at the BSR meeting the previous day due,
 apparently, to a misunderstanding on the part of BSR's
 secretariat.  [As of the date of this report I have not heard
 anything further regarding the status of X3.198.]

 MAINTENANCE OF FORTRAN 90
 Nearly all of this meeting was given over to processing
 interpretation, clarification, and correction requests.
 Responses to quite a few new or previously unresolved issues were
 tentatively approved, and a number of previously approved
 responses were revised.  I did not record the exact numbers, but
 according to Andrew Tait, editor of our maintenance standing
 document, X3J3/S20, we made a little progress towards clearing
 the (still substantial) backlog of unresolved issues.

 A change to our maintenance procedures was also made at this
 meeting.  Heretofore, we attempted to treat essentially every
 question asked on the f90interp electronic mailing list as a
 formal defect report.  This resulted in a very large amount of
 bookkeeping overhead tracking questions that did not really
 require formal responses (e.g., "Does the standard permit
 such-and-such?", "{Yes|no},see section so-and-so.", "Oh,
 thanks!") or else were eventually superseded by a more formal
 request defect report which was distilled out of the discussion
 on the network.  The committee agreed to establish a more formal
 mechanism for submitting defect reports, and to use the bulk of
 the exchanges on the network informally, i.e., to provide
 background information on the issue and to begin work on its
 resolution.

 ADMINISTRATIVE BUSINESS

 MEETING FEES:  The treasurer recommended an increase of the
 meeting fee from $80 to $100.  After some discussion, this was
 approved:  FV (15-4*) -- PASSED.

 MEMBERSHIP:  At the beginning of this meeting X3J3 had 33
 members, giving a quorum of 12 (=1+INT(Members/3)), and a
 majority of the membership of 17 (=1+INT(Members/2)).  At the end
 of the meeting, two members were dropped for non-attendance,
 leaving the membership at 31.

 FUTURE MEETINGS:

 123rd     9-13 November 1992, New Haven, CT (host: Rochelle
           Lauer).

 124th     8-12 February 1993, Fort Lauderdale, FL (host: Bill
           Leonard).

 125th     10-14 May 1993, University of Illinois at
           Urbana/Champaign, IL (host: Kurt Hirchert).

 1993 WG5 Meeting
           5-9 July 1993, Berchtesgaden, Germany (host: Karl-Heinz
           Rotthauser).

 126th     12-16 July 1993, Brussels, Belgium (host: Dick
           Hendrickson).

 127th     8-12 November 1993, Albuquerque, NM.

 128th     February 1994, Sunnyvale, CA.

 NEXT DISTRIBUTION:  The closing date for the next pre-meeting
 distribution is 5 October 1992.  To get an item into the
 distribution it should be received before this date by:

      Linda O'Gara
      Supercomputer Systems, Inc.
      2021 Las Positas Ct.
      Livermore, CA   94550
      Phone: 415-373-8040
      FAX:   415-373-6270
      Email: uunet!ssi!ljo


--
Leonard J. Moss <ljm@slac.stanford.edu>   | My views don't necessarily
Stanford Linear Accelerator Center, MS 97 | reflect those of SLAC,
Stanford, CA   94309                      | Stanford or the DOE