Members of the BCS FSG will probably be aware that the Final Committee Draft of the proposed revised Fortran standard (Fortran 2003) is now available for public comment. The document is a 4.0Mb PDF file and is also available in compressed pdf, postscript and plain text formats (file sizes 2.2Mb, 1.0Mb, 394Kb respectively).

Formal balloting is via the member bodies of ISO. This is to invite those in the UK to contribute to the BSI vote by sending comments to the BSI Fortran convenor, David Muxworthy. This is essentially the last chance to make any changes to the document before it emerges as the new Fortran standard in late 2004.

Readers who have not been following recent developments in detail might find useful a summary of the principal new features of the language. This is available in document N1579 .

At this stage of proceedings, ISO/IEC guidelines indicate that only editorial or very minor technical changes should be made to the document but the standards committees would be very pleased to receive suggestions for such things as clarifying descriptions, for very minor regularization of language features or for help in identifying any typographical errors.

Material for the UK ballot should ideally be sent as soon as possible and must arrive no later than Friday 16 January 2004. Contributors are welcome to comment more than once; it is preferable for the BSI Fortran panel to receive multiple small messages throughout the comment period than to receive a few large messages at the end of it. Please use plain ASCII rather than formatted text. Suggestions for changes must include proposed replacement text.

Formally, those living outside the UK should submit comments through their own national standards body. The following are also members of the ISO Programming Languages Committee and have votes on the Fortran FCD: Austria, Belgium, Brazil, Canada, China, Czech Republic, Denmark, Egypt, Finland, France, Germany, Ireland, Italy, Japan, DPR of Korea, Republic of Korea, Netherlands, Norway, Russian Federation, Romania, Slovenia, Switzerland, Ukraine, USA. In addition the following are 'observer' members and are permitted but are not obliged to vote: Argentina, Bulgaria, Cuba, Estonia, Greece, Hungary, Iceland, India, Indonesia, Israel, Kenya, New Zealand, Poland, Serbia and Montenegro, Singapore, Sweden, Thailand, Turkey. A full list of ISO members is available on the ISO web site. However in case of difficulty please send comments to me.

David Muxworthy
BSI Fortran Convenor
October 21, 2003