The Group was established in 1970 to provide an open forum for Fortran users.

Its main aims are:

• to disseminate information about Fortran and its application in various fields,
• to provide a platform for discussion of users' needs and requirements in future versions of Fortran,
• to encourage the development of the language in collaboration with national and international standardization bodies,
• to promote the use of the Fortran language.

To discover more about the Group and its activities please explore the links on the sidebar of this page.

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Latest News

[9/24] 2024 AGM

The 2024 AGM will be held on Thursday 10th October followed by a meeting with Fortran-related content in the afternoon. Further details can be found on the AGM page. The meeting requires registration and can be attended in person or online.

[9/24] Sustaining Fortran research software event

A workshop entitled "Back to the Fortran Future: workshop on sustaining Fortran research software" was held as a satellite event to the RSECon24 conference in September. Details can be found on the conference Satellite Events page.

It is hoped that various activiies will be taken forward from the event such as creating or contributing to a curated repository of pointers to Fortran resources, building a sustainable community and developing an introductory training course in modern Fortran.

[10/23] 2023 Joint Meeting presentations

Most talks are now available for download from the 2023 AGM page.

Note that John Reid's talk on Generic Programming has been updated to show an example using the latest J3 23-222 generics proposal syntax.

[9/23] 2023 AGM

Further details are now available for the 2023 AGM which will be held on Thursday 28 September followed by a meeting with Fortran-related content in the afternoon. Further details can be found on the AGM page. The meeting can be attended in person or online.

[9/23] UKRSE conference content

At the UK RSE conference (RSECon23) there were a couple of sessions that were relevant to Fortran. The first was a discussion on Fortran training. The notes from that session are available here althugh unfortunately without the audience contributions. The second was a talk by Sean Marshallsay of Queen's University Belfast covering refactoring Legacy codes to remove global state.

[8/23] 2023 AGM

The 2023 AGM will be held on Thursday 28 September followed by a meeting with Fortran-related content in the afternoon. Further details can be found on the AGM page. The meeting can be attended in person or online.

[11/22] 2022 AGM presentations

Presentations from the session following the 2022 AGM are now avaiable via the links on the AGM page.

[08/21] 2021 AGM

The 2021 AGM will be held virtually on the afternoon of Thursday 30 September. Further details, including how to register can be found on the AGM page.

[08/21] FortranCon 2021

Members of the FSG committee supported the FortranCon 2021 conference this year. The conference was held on September 23-24 and many presentations are availalbe for download with recordings to follow.
See the FortranCon 2021 website for more details.

[06/21] Update on Fortran Standards progress

Our Standards Officer has provided an update on standards activity since October 2020. Features noted are conditional expressions, BOZ literal constants, system_clock and generics.

[09/20] 2020 One Day Meeting

The 2020 AGM and Joint Meeting with the Computational Physics Group of the Institute of Physics will be held online on 24 September. Full details can be found here.

[08/20] Update to Group Archives

Our archivist (David Muxworthy) has made a significant addition to the archive by providing more historic documents in HTML format and in particular by adding many new documents showing activities of the group in fortran standardisation during the 1970s.

[06/20] History of coarrays article

John Reid, Bill Long and Jon Steidel have written an interesting article "History of coarrays and SPMD parallelism in Fortran" available from the ACM website at this location.

[03/20] FortranCon 2020

A call is open for submissions to the first Internationa Conference on Fortran to be held 2-4 July 2020 at the Univeristy of Zurich. Submissions can request remote presentation and it is possible that the conference may take place virtually.

[11/19] 2019 One Day Meeting

A summary of the Open Discussion Q&A held at the end of the 2019 AGM is now available on the meeting page.

[01/19] Fortran Standardisation Benefits Survey - Final Report

The Final Report on the Fortran Standardisation Benefits Survey is now available. The Survey was developed by members of the Fortran specialist group committee and was open from 30 June 2018 to 3 January 2019.

[10/18] Open Source Fortran meeting

There will be joint meeting between the BCS Open Source and Fortran Specialist Groups on the topic of Open Source Fortran in Manchester on November 15. More details can be found on this page.

[10/18] 2018 One Day Meeting

Documents and presentations are now available from the 2018 AGM and Joint Meeting with the Computational Physics Group of the Institute of Physics held on 27 September. Full details here.

[07/18] Fortran Standards status

Following the June WG5 meeting in Berkeley, CA, the Final Draft International Standard (N2159) was constructed for ballot. It is expected that the ballot will close in October and if no further issues are found, the F2018 standard should be finally published by ISO in November.

The minutes from this meeting (N2158). and the strategic plan (N2154), can be found on the wg5-fortran.org site.

[05/18] Fortran Standards status

The Fortran 2018 standard is nearly complete. The formal voting period for the DIS (Draft International Standard) is over and J3 will be responding to the country comments and constructing a new draft at its meeting in Berkeley, California, 11-15 June. It is expected that the changes will be minor and that the standard will be published later this year.

[05/18] J3 Meeting Report

The FEB-2018 J3 meeting was mainly concerned with analysing the results of the WG5 user survey, N2147, and choosing the list of features to recommend to WG5 for inclusion in Fortran 202X. The full record of the meeting can be found on the J3 site (https://j3-fortran.org). The survey results showed that two features:

1. generic programming or templates and
2. exceptions

were very popular with the users. Therefore J3 decided to recommend to WG5 to add these to Fortran 202X. The J3 members present then made further suggestions, partly based on the survey and partly on their own views on the next Fortran standard. These are documented in J3 documents
18-122r1 and
18-156.
Among these are: bit stings, better enumeration types, asyncronous subroutine execution, degree trig functions, protected structure components, short-circuit logical operations, more character intrinsics, constants for logical kinds, binary compatibility of C descriptors, etc. The next step is for WG5 to agree the exact list of features for Fortran 202X at the JUN-2018 meeting ( N2148, N2150 available from https://wg5-fortran.org).

[11/17] Fortran Birds of A Feather session at SC17

Members of the FSG were instrumental in proposing a 'BOF' session at the premier High Performance Computing Conference SC17 as a way to mark the 60th Anniversary of Fortran

The BOF Fortran Is 60 Years Old - Has It Changed for the Better? took the form of short presentations by industry experts followed by a lively discussion. In particular the audience (many under 30!) was interested in how the committee decided on features to add to the language and made requests for a template feature.

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About BCS - The Chartered Institute for IT

Founded in 1957
Royal Charter granted in 1984
Registered Chartered Engineering Institute 1990
BCS is a member of the Council of the European Professional Informatics Societies

BCS exists to provide service and support to the IS community, including individual practitioners, employers of IS staff and the general public. It is the only professional body able to confer chartered status in all three of the following areas: Chartered Engineer (CEng), Chartered Scientist (CSci) and Chartered IT Professional (CITP).

See the BCS main web site for more about the Institute.

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Last modified: Tue 1 Oct 2024 15:30:09