Fortran Specialist Group Annual General Meeting 2023

1. Apologies for absence
2. Minutes of the previous AGM (29^th September 2022)
3. Matters arising
4. Chairman's report (draft)
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
10. Any other business
11. Date of next meeting

Joint meeting with Computational Physics Group of Institute of Physics

Archives of IT is a free-to-access online museum and archive that records and presents the modern history of the UK IT and Coms industry, its achievements and its impact on society. The collection consists of oral history of members of the industry and selected documents that inform on topics from the period. The timescale of interest is c.1950 to the present, including current developments and thoughts on the future from interviewees. The archive complements the collections of artefacts and machines in other museums.

Adrian Murphy will talk about the collection of oral history, including the kind of people interviewed and scope of the conversation, illustrating with examples. Similarly, he will describe the collections of documents, including periodical sets and one-off donations.

Material is gathered into themes, that reflect the development of the industry. Adrian will show, with examples, how the material can be aggregated to present interesting “stories” from the industry and to enable scholars and enthusiasts to explore aspects of the industry, for research.

The audience will be shown how they can make a virtual visit to the museum from anywhere in the world with an internet connection to explore the data and the presentation outputs.

Adrian will present some of the highlights to be found in the museum and the plans for the future.

On three people who made a significant contribution to Fortran development in the 1970s and 1980s.

The Fortran I/O system, already quite powerful, has had many enhancements in recent years. This is an attempt to summarise the most useful ones and put them into context.

WG5 has accepted a proposal from the Japanese National Body for extending the generic capability that has been present in Fortran since Fortran 90. The programmer will be able to declare that a procedure is generic and has arguments that may have alternative types, kinds, or ranks. The compiler will generate those explicit versions that are invoked. It will solve a problem that my group has faced for more than 50 years. It began with having to write and maintain versions for both single and double precision and is worse now with more precisions of reals and several lengths of integers.

This proposal will complement a much more ambitious US proposal that has been developed by a J3 subgroup since the 2019 WG5 meeting in Japan.

This talk will explain the Japanese proposal and give a very brief summary of the aims of the US proposal.

Discussion...