Report on Fortran 2000 Forum

London, Wednesday 30 October 2002

John Reid, JKR Associates
Convener, ISO Fortran Committee WG5


The British Computer Society Fortran Specialist Group organized a one-day forum on the draft Fortran 2000 standard in London on 30 October.

Most of the time was spent on presentations on the changes from Fortran 95:

10.30 - 10.45 John Reid: The standardization process and an overview of the new features

10.45 - 11.35 Malcolm Cohen: Data manipulation enhancements

11.35 - 12.25 John Reid: Support for IEEE arithmetic and exceptions; interoperability with C

13.30 - 14.20 Steve Morgan: Parameterised derived types, derived type input/output, asynchronous and stream input/output, access to the host environment and international usage

14.20 - 15.10 Malcolm Cohen: Object-oriented features

This was followed by an hour of discussion during the course of which the following emerged:

1. Regret that more people were not there (25 people registered). My personal view that the quality of the audience made up for the lack of quantity.
2. General satisfaction with progress and a determination not to suggest anything that might 'rock the boat' or delay the schedule.
3. The following suggestions for changes. I show the straw votes as yes-no figures. There were also many who were undecided.
   
   
   1. Delete ALIAS.  7 - 2
   2. Delete ENUM.  6 - 1
   3. Add reallocate as an intrinsic subroutine that applies only to rank-one arrays.  many - 0
   4. Add specification of defaults for type parameter values of derived types.  7 - 0
   5. Delete the option of a fresh specification of a default initial value for the parent component when a type is extended.  6 - 0
   6. Add a new form of elemental that does not require the procedure to be pure and calls it in succession for each array element in array subscript order.  3 - 2
   7. Delete finalizers.  1 - 6.

Items a. to e. will be considered by the BSI Fortran Panel when it meets to advise on the UK comments.

The meeting ending with thanks being expressed to the speakers and to Peter Crouch (Chairman, BCS Fortran Specialist Group) for all the hard work he put into organizing a very successful day.

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