Minutes of the Annual General Meeting of the BCS Fortran
Specialist Group held at BCS HQ, 13 Mansfield Street
London on 16 May 1991
Present: Miles Ellis Oxford University
Mike Geary NAG
Carol Hewlett LSE
Peter Holland SSL
Chris Lazou ULCC
Chris Little Met Office
Brian Meek King's College London
Mike Nunn CCTA
Mike Roth AEA Technology
P Schofield QMC (University of London)
John Wilson Leicester University
John Young PE-MOD
1. APOLOGIES FOR ABSENCE
Apologies for absence were received from Rick Collins,
E Golton, John Reid, Lindsay Savage, Lawrie Schonfelder and Dave
Vallance.
2. MINUTES OF THE LAST AGM
The minutes of the last AGM were presented and approved.
3. MATTERS ARISING
There were no matters arising from the minutes of the last
AGM.
The retiring Chairman, John Wilson, briefly reviewed the
meetings of the past year. There had been four meetings starting
with last year's AGM which had been followed by a review of the
Group's activities over the past 20 years given by David
Muxworthy. The next meeting at the end of June was the last of
the meetings on the old 3-month cycle so was less than 2 months
after the AGM. Because of a lack of notice for this meeting only
a few stalwarts attended and the afternoon presentations were
given by 3 members of the Group. The October meeting was held
at the Rutherford Appleton Laboratory arranged by E Golton and
after the morning session a visit was made to the Space Centre.
After lunch talks were given by RAL staff followed by a tour of
the Atlas Laboratories. The February meeting started late due
to adverse weather conditions with the afternoon given over to
Salford Software for a Workshop on compilers and a review of
Fortran 90. One newsletter was produced during the year.
The Group did not organise any events like the Fortran Forum
during the year. However, the Group co-sponsored with British
Gas the reception for delegates to WG5 in March.
John Wilson then went on to review the future of the Group.
With the Fortran 90 Standard due out at the end of July the
emphasis of the Group was changing. There was going to be less
work on standards and more on implementation. Perhaps there
should be a different form of meeting with less emphasis on
business and more on technical matters. It was up to the new
committee to decide on how the Group should function in the
future.
[A note on the standardization process, written by the editor
of the Fortran 90 standard, is appended.]
Miles Ellis then thanked the Group for their support of the
WG5 Reception which was appreciated by the delegates.
There followed a short discussion on the value of meetings
and whether they should be half day or continue to be whole day
meetings.
5. TREASURER'S REPORT
In the absence of the Treasurer, E Golton, the Secretary,
John Young, presented the Treasurer's report.
There have been transfers of funds for Gold and Current
accounts made by BCS HQ for which there was no notification. So
the Gold account shows a balance based on last year's figure with
the residual monies shown in the Current account. BCS HQ also
insisted that the Group's allocation for the year was only £100
not £600. Hence the overspend on the HQ account. The accounts
had yet to be finally audited.
6. ANY OTHER BUSINESS
The Secretary, John Young, on behalf of the meeting and the
Group, thanked the retiring Chairman, John Wilson, for his
leadership of the Fortran Specialist Group for the past 10 years.
During his time as Chairman he had seen the development,
disunity, and finally the acceptance of the new Fortran 90
Standard. His quiet dedication, development reviewing, cajoling,
and pressure ensured that the voice of the British Fortran User
was clearly heard on the various Standards Bodies.
7. ELECTION OF OFFICERS
The retiring Chairman, John Wilson, had received only one
nomination for the new committee. Mike Roth was proposed by John
Young and seconded by Miles Ellis for the post of Chairman.
There were no nominations for the posts of Vice-Chairman,
Secretary and Treasurer but Chris Lazou, John Young and E Golton
were willing to stand again. Therefore it was unanimously agreed
that Mike Roth, Chris Lazou, John Young, and E Golton were duly
elected to the posts of Chairman, Vice-Chairman, Secretary, and
Treasurer respectively.
John Young, Secretary
21 February 1992
[Minutes for the AGM part of this meeting were also issued as a separate
document for use at the 1992 AGM. They are appended to these minutes.]
FORTRAN SPECIALIST GROUP
APPENDIX A
Final Accounts 1990 - 1991
GOLD Account
Balance at 30/4/90 £852.24
Interest £123.96
-------
Balance at 30/4/91 £976.20
-------
Current Account
Balance at 30/4/90 £550.87
Income: subs, F8x £630.00
Expenditure:
Grant to WG5 SC22 £80.00
Scottish Expenses £29.62
Transfer to HQ £595.87
(to debt on F8x production) ------
£705.49 £705.49
-------
Balance at 30/4/91 £475.38
-------
HQ Account
Expenditure: BCS Services £410.61
Income:
Budget allocation for 1990/91 £100.00
Sundry income £15.00
-------
Overspend £395.00
-------
E. Golton, Treasurer
14th May 91
Fortran Standardization
Introduction: The following remarks on the standardization
process were made by Walt Brainerd prompted by typical
criticism by users distant from it.
Status: Fortran 90 is an APPROVED international standard.
It is not yet published, but, in that regard, I just sent
the typeset masters to Geneva for publication. The
identical document is being processed as an American
standard and should be approved as such later this year.
Language Name: The document adopted by ISO and to be
adopted by ANSI itself says that the language is to be
called "Fortran 90", even though the ANSI project refers to
it as "Fortran Extended".
Members of X3J3: There are non-USA voting members of X3J3.
They vote on everything except when establishing a US
position on an international question (such as how the US
should vote on an ISO standard).
Recent changes: The "93 changes" someone mentioned done
recently are almost all of the order of adding a comma.
Some biggies were adding a couple of words to clarify how
the INDEX function works with arguments that are empty
strings and changing a constraint to an ordinary textual
restriction (because the constraint could not be checked at
compile time as required by the standard). There have also
been some slight rearrangements and minor corrections to
the BNF. There have been no real technical changes, other
than fixing bugs, for about a year. As far as I know,
there are very few, if any, errors due to changes in the
standard in our book or "Fortran 90 Explained", but there
might be something fairly minor.
Implementations: It is silly to think that there will be
no implementations of Fortran 90 until near the beginning
of the next millennium. Any vendor who waits that long will
be out of the market.
Time to create a standard: It's an interesting question
whether there should be smaller intervals between standards
with fewer changes. Historically, the main technical
content of a proposed standard was in place around 1985.
While we began to prepare a really good document and make
the information available for public comments, those
opposed to the philosophy of the standard started arriving
on X3J3 in larger numbers. They were not successful in
killing the thing, but did cripple it and delay it. Many
"compromises" were made which caused some "standard
practice" items to be added, such as namelist i/o and
include, but also allowed time to add pointers (for
example). All of this disruption meant that the time could
not be spent producing the best document possible (and if
you think it is not good to design a language by committee,
it is probably worse to have the committee as a whole try
to write the document).
Vector and parallel processing: Most of what is in Fortran
90 was on a list when we began in 1977 and 1978. Obviously
parallel processing was not, but array processing was.
Surely parallel processing will be one of the main points
addressed next time (if there is one) with the help of X3H5
and others.
Standardizing existing practice: This is one of the
greatest red herrings in the development of Fortran, at
least as presented by some folks. Of course, everything in
Fortran 90 is "existing practice"! It's just a question of
who has been practicing what. Should we not adopt ideas
from other languages that are common practice (e.g.,
recursion)? Should we try to adopt the same syntax as
implemented by current Fortran vendors (surely "yes" when
the syntax is similar and the SEMANTICS are the same -- not
really the case for either include or namelist)? Should we
do this even when a vendor has purposely chosen a different
syntax so as not to be in conflict with the proposed
standard (e.g., DEC structures)? Strictly following the
guidelines of standardizing only what is common to current
Fortran implementations, we would have neither the
character data type nor the block IF in Fortran 77 and we
would not have array processing in Fortran 90. Many people
think these are among the most important features of
Fortran. And it is interesting that there is now the
opinion that Fortran 90 is not going to be useful because
it does not address parallel computing. It's real tough to
try to create a philosophy that addresses these issues.
Like all other arguments, this one is raised just precisely
when someone wants to argue for or against a particular
feature and they conveniently forget it in other cases.
The future: The experiences we have had trying to get out
Fortran 95 indicates to me that a much different process
must be used next time (if there is one). My proposal is
to have the design, implementation, and the document done
by a small group (five people?) under the close supervision
of a standards body such as X3J3 or WG5, with both that
body and the public carefully reviewing the results at each
major milestone.
Walt Brainerd Sun Microsystems, Inc.
walt.brainerd@eng.sun.com MS MTV 5-40
Mountain View, CA 94043
415/336-5991
Minutes for the AGM business part of the meeting.
Minutes of the Annual General Meeting of the BCS Fortran
Specialist Group held at BCS HQ, 13 Mansfield Street
London on 16 May 1991
Present: Miles Ellis Oxford University
Mike Geary NAG
Carol Hewlett LSE
Peter Holland SSL
Chris Lazou ULCC
Chris Little Met Office
Brian Meek King's College London
Mike Nunn CCTA
Mike Roth AEA Technology
P Schofield QMC (University of London)
John Wilson Leicester University
John Young PE-MOD
1. APOLOGIES FOR ABSENCE
Apologies for absence were received from Rick Collins,
E Golton, John Reid, Lindsay Savage, Lawrie Schonfelder and Dave
Vallance.
2. MINUTES OF THE LAST AGM
The minutes of the last AGM were presented and approved.
3. MATTERS ARISING
There were no matters arising from the minutes of the last
AGM.
4. CHAIRMAN'S ADDRESS
The retiring Chairman, John Wilson, briefly reviewed the
meetings of the past year. There had been four meetings starting
with last year's AGM which had been followed by a review of the
Group's activities over the past 20 years given by David
Muxworthy. The next meeting at the end of June was the last of
the meetings on the old 3-month cycle so was less than 2 months
after the AGM. Because of a lack of notice for this meeting only
a few stalwarts attended and the afternoon presentations were
given by 3 members of the Group. The October meeting was held
at the Rutherford Appleton Laboratory arranged by E Golton and
after the morning session a visit was made to the Space Centre.
After lunch talks were given by RAL staff followed by a tour of
the Atlas Laboratories. The February meeting started late due
to adverse weather conditions with the afternoon given over to
Salford Software for a Workshop on compilers and a review of
Fortran 90. One newsletter was produced during the year.
The Group did not organise any events like the Fortran Forum
during the year. However, the Group co-sponsored with British
Gas the reception for delegates to WG5 in March.
John Wilson then went on to review the future of the Group.
With the Fortran 90 Standard due out at the end of July the
emphasis of the Group was changing. There was going to be less
work on standards and more on implementation. Perhaps there
should be a different form of meeting with less emphasis on
business and more on technical matters. It was up to the new
committee to decide on how the Group should function in the
future.
Miles Ellis then thanked the Group for their support of the
WG5 Reception which was appreciated by the delegates.
There followed a short discussion on the value of meetings
and whether they should be half day or continue to be whole day
meetings.
5. TREASURER'S REPORT
In the absence of the Treasurer, E Golton, the Secretary,
John Young, presented the Treasurer's report.
There have been transfers of funds for Gold and Current
accounts made by BCS HQ for which there was no notification. So
the Gold account shows a balance based on last year's figure with
the residual monies shown in the Current account. BCS HQ also
insisted that the Group's allocation for the year was only £100
not £600. Hence the overspend on the HQ account. The accounts
had yet to be finally audited.
6. ANY OTHER BUSINESS
The Secretary, John Young, on behalf of the meeting and the
Group, thanked the retiring Chairman, John Wilson, for his
leadership of the Fortran Specialist Group for the past 10 years.
During his time as Chairman he had seen the development,
disunity, and finally the acceptance of the new Fortran 90
Standard. His quiet dedication, development reviewing, cajoling,
and pressure ensured that the voice of the British Fortran User
was clearly heard on the various Standards Bodies.
7. ELECTION OF OFFICERS
The retiring Chairman, John Wilson, had received only one
nomination for the new committee. Mike Roth was proposed by John
Young and seconded by Miles Ellis for the post of Chairman.
There were no nominations for the posts of Vice-Chairman,
Secretary and Treasurer but Chris Lazou, John Young and E Golton
were willing to stand again. Therefore it was unanimously agreed
that Mike Roth, Chris Lazou, John Young, and E Golton were duly
elected to the posts of Chairman, Vice-Chairman, Secretary, and
Treasurer respectively.
John Young, Secretary
21 February 1992