Fortran Specialist Group AGM 2010 Agenda

1. Apologies for absence
2. Minutes of the previous AGM (11th June 2009)
3. Matters arising
4. Chairman's report
5. Treasurer's report
   SG Development Fund report
6. Membership Secretary's report
7. Web Editor's report
8. Election of Officers and Committee members
   (The following is taken from the Fortran SG Constitution:
   The name of any member accepting nomination for election or re-election as an Officer or as a Committee member shall be submitted in writing to the Secretary 7 clear days prior to the date of the AGM by two members of the Group with the written consent of the nominee.
   "In writing" applies equally to email or paper copy.)
9. Future activities for the Group
   including discussion of online Fortran resources
10. Any other business
11. Date of next meeting

CASTEP is a materials modelling code based on quantum mechanical density functional theory, used for the simulation from first principles of systems varying from surface structure of catalysts, magnetic nanoparticles to NMR and optical spectroscopy of solids.

CASTEP was designed and engineered using Fortran 90 beginning in 1999. I will discuss the use and style of Fortran coding, with a perspective on how it has contributed to achieving the aims of the project; some reflections on the power and limitations of the language, and provide some comments and reflections on the language and compilers from a developer/physicist perspective.

Fortran 2003 contains features for interoperability of Fortran with C, and they are widely implemented as extensions of Fortran 95 compilers. This provides for interoperability of procedures with non-optional arguments that are scalars, explicit-shape arrays, or assumed-size arrays, but not with arguments that are assumed-shape, allocatable, pointer, or optional.

To fill this gap, WG5 has been working on a Technical Report since 2004. The original aim was to complete in 2007, but work on Fortran 2008 took precedence. With Fortran 2008 complete, it has high priority and WG5 expects to finish by the end of 2011.

In this talk, I will explain how the new features are provided in the current draft, http://www.j3-fortran.org/doc/year/10/10-165r2.pdf and summarize what is left to do.

John will also give a brief report on other recent activities of WG5 as convenor (chairman).
(WG5 is the ISO working group responsible for Fortran standardisation)