ISO/IEC JTC1/SC22/WG5 N1202 German National Activity Report to ISO/IEC JTC1/SC22/WG5 Dresden, Germany, July 22-26, 1996 The German Fortran Working Group has met once since the last WG5 meeting in San Diego 1995. The group is currently composed of 13 members, most of them are employed by universities or research centers. Points for discussion at this meeting were: ¥ Fortran 95 The Fortran 95 document WG5/N1176 was discussed and approved. ¥ Fortran 9o Maintenance Document WG5/N1175 (Draft Corr.3) was discussed and approved. ¥ Exception Handling We have discussed within the DIN Working Group about the IEEE exception proposal, and we have had a few objections against the proposal as defined at that time. Christian Weber has prepared our comments and distributed them to the group that is responsible for this topic. We think, however, that some problems still remain to be solved. ¥ Interoperability between Fortran and C Michael Hennecke has reported about this working document. We have subsequently discussed this paper and made our comments. As a result of this discussion the Fortran group agreed essentially on the proposal. ¥ Requirements for Fortran 2000 With respect to the future evolution of Fortran standard we discussed the requirements included in the repository document WG5/N1144 from October 1995. As a result of this discussion the Fortran group agreed that the following features are considered essential for the usage and success of Fortran in the future and, therefore, are highly desirable to be added to Fortran. The following extensions are those that Germany believes should be included in Fortran 2000. They are listed in decreasing order of priority. Exception Handling, Interoperability with C, Data Type Enhancements These much needed extensions which are currently being developed into Type 2 Technical Reports are those that should be incorporated unchanged into the standard Fortran 2000. Data Abstraction Facilities Much of the data abstraction infra-structure is already included in Fortran 95 but there are other features that need to be added: - Derived Type I/O - Constructors and Destructors - Procedure Variables - Remove Requirement for INTENT for Operator/Assignment Operands (WG5/1189 #56) - Parameterised Derived Types - Priorities for Extension Operators Command-Line Arguments (WG5/N1189 #20) We believe that getting command line arguments is desirable. It has been implemented by vendors on a wide variety of computers and compilers. Since the basic functionality appears to be common among implementations, a facility for getting such arguments should be standardised. Regularisation Allow INTENT for pointer arguments (WG5/N1189 #44/44a). Allow renaming of defined operators in the USE statement(WG5/N1189 #41). Type Extensions Allow aliasing type definitions, unsigned INTEGER data type, an intrinsic data type BIT or bitstrings (Referenzen: WG5/N1189 #11, #37 und #21). Extensions to be not included in Fortran 2000 The following extensions of the requirementsÕ list are those that Germany believes should not be included in Fortran 2000: - Varying-length character with declared maximum (WG5/N1189 #34) - Internal procedures as actual arguments (WG5/N1189 #42) - POSIX binding to Fortran 90 (WG5/N1189 #47) - Variable repeat specifiers in formats (WG5/N1189 #48) - Specifying default precisions (WG5/N1189 #49) ¥ Further Extensions to be included in Fortran 2000 Manuela Zuern and Uwe Kuester from the Technical University of Stuttgart have proposed further extensions for inclusion in Fortran 2000. Referenzen: WG5/N1186, WG5/N1187 und WG5/N1189 #63b, #78-87 ¥ German Translation of the Document Fortran 95 We have one active member of the Working Group who has produced a German translation of the Fortran 95 document. According to their rules, DIN is not prepared to assign the Copyright to him. Karl-Heinz RotthŠuser DIN Fortran Convener Page 2