ISO/IEC JTC1/SC22/WG5 N1150 To: WG5 From: Miles Ellis Subject: Report on SC22 Plenary I attended the Plenary meeting of SC22 in September as Convenor of WG5. The Plenary made a number of decisions which were directly relevant to WG5, as well as some others which are indirectly relevant. The resolutions that relate directly to Fortran are as follows: Resolution 95-4: Revision of Synchronization Plans ISO/IEC JTC1/SC22 directs WG4 (COBOL), WG5 (Fortran), WG14 (C) and WG15 (POSIX) to review their respective synchronization plans and recommend to the 1996 SC22 Plenary appropriate changes in light of revised JTC1 balloting procedures and any changes in working group practices. This resolution is now moot, as the implementation of the revised DIS procedures has been deferred, see N1143. Resolution 95-5: Subdivision of Fortran work item ISO/IEC JTC1/SC22 authorizes the subdivision of project 22.02.01 - programming language Fortran as follows: JTC 1.22.02.01.01 - Programming language Fortran JTC 1.22.02.01.02 - Floating Point Exception Handling (TR Type 2) JTC 1.22.02.01.03 - Interoperability between Fortran and C (TR Type 2) JTC 1.22.02.01.04 - Enhanced Derived Type Facilities (TR Type 2) acknowledges that WG5's objective for the TR's is to gain experience with the subjects before their incorporation in a future revision of Fortran (Fortran 2000) agrees with WG5's intent to avoid gratuitous, or unnecessary, changes to the technical specification when the TR's are integrated into the revision in order to minimize impact on implementors of these features. This intention should be reflected in WG5 internal process documents; and instructs WG5 to confirm the scope of the TR on enhanced derived type facilities at its November 1995 meeting and report any changes to SC22. Resolution 95-6: Revision of ISO 1539-2 - Varying Length Character String Module ISO/IEC JTC1/SC22 approves WG5's request to revise the informative annex of ISO/IEC 1539-2 - Fortran Varying Length Character String Module (Project JTC 1.22.02.02), for alignment with ISO/IEC 1539-1:1995. Resolution 95-20: Appointment of project editors ISO/IEC JTC1/SC22 confirms the appointment of the following project editors: Dr. Lawrie Schonfelder, for Project 22.02.02 - Revision of ISO 1539-2 - Varying Length Character String Module Mr. John Reid, for Project 22.02.01.02 - TR (Type 2) on Floating Point Exception Handling Dr. Miles Ellis, for Project 22.02.01.03 - TR (Type 2) on Interoperability between Fortran and C Mr. Malcom Cohen, for Project 22.02.01.04 - TR (Type 2) on Enhanced Derived Type Facilities . . . The other major items to affect WG5 were related to electronic distribution and the use of the World Wide Web. The entire Plenary went into Ad Hoc mode on the Wednesday to discuss electronic distribution at interminable length (i.e. all day!), and then the majority continued for a couple of hours on Thursday, while the remainder, including me, took part in an Ad Hoc on the use of the World Wide Web. The main conclusion from the first discussions was that the JTC1 "Guidelines" are quite inappropriate for SC22. These call for documents to be distributed on MS-DOS formatted diskettes in RTF, MS-Word or WordPerfect formats. SC22 was quite clear that diskettes were not appropriate and preferred a combination of email and ftp, while there was little enthusiasm for any of the formats recommended by JTC1 - the favourite options being ASCII/email for shorter documents, and PostScript for longer ones. By an amazing coincidence (?) this was exactly what the survey that I carried out amongst the WG5 membership wanted for our non-paper distribution! Another strongly recommended format - although not one which is currently much used - was Acrobat (PDF). This, for those unfamiliar with it, is a system developed by Adobe precisely to meet the problem of electronic distribution (PDF stands for Portable Document Format) and enables documents to be transmitted electronically with their format (including fonts, graphics, etc) preserved, even if the fonts used are not available on the readers computer. The Acrobat files can be displayed correctly on the screen, can have embedded keywords, threads and hypertext links, can be copied to other documents using normal cut-and-paste techniques, and can be printed. Acrobat Readers are freely available for major platforms, and are also freely distributable. Acrobat documents can be produced directly by some Wordprocessors and DTP systems, or can be created by use of special programs from major WP formats and from PostSCript documents. One of the objectives of the Ad Hoc was to draw up a position paper for the SC22 delegation to a special JTC1meeting on the topic of electronic distribution which is being held in New York next month. The outcome of this meeting was disappointing in that the SC22 position paper was welcomed, and SC22 was encouraged to pursue its recommended approaches. Nevertheless, the majority of member bodies wished to continue with diskette distribution according to the current JTC1 guidelines. The World Wide Web Ad Hoc was mainly concerned with procedures, as everyone agreed that its use was a good idea. More discussions on this topic will be carried out electronically, with a view to providing guidelines early next year. Broadly speaking, the plan is to have an official SC22 home page, with various official pages linked to it. One set of such pages will relate to the individual Working Groups and will contain the formal details of each WG, together with a link to that WG's home page if one exists - and it is hoped that all WGs will establish their own pages if they have not already done so. Each WG's own pages will be its own responsibilty and, although guidelines will be prepared, they may take whatever form the WG wishes. The only change that is appropriate for our pages concerns links to commercial organisations. The general view was that official WG pages should not contain direct links to commercial pages, but that where these were felt to be appropriate they should be linked via the editor's personal page or some similar form of indirection. Since our pages dis originally contain links to Fortran suppliers, etc, I have made an appropriate change, and have created a page called "Fortran links" which is a personal page containing links to various Fortran-related pages. There is a single link to that page from the main WG5 page (as well as from my own personal page). Finally, it should be noted that Bob Follet was "enthusiastically endorsed" for appointment to a further term as Chairman of SC22, and Bill Rinehuls was officially welcomed as the new Secretariat for SC22.