ISO/IEC JTC1/SC22/WG5-N1398

                        BRITISH STANDARDS INSTITUTION
                  COMMITTEE ON PROGRAMMING LANGUAGES (IST/5)

            UK National Activity Report presented to the meeting of
      ISO/IEC JTC1/SC22/WG5 (Fortran), Oulu, Finland, August 14-18, 2000


WG5 Convenorship
As members will be aware, at the previous WG5 meeting Miles Ellis
indicated his intention to resign as convenor at the next SC22 plenary
meeting.  John Reid was proposed as new convenor by the British member
body and this proposal was approved by SC22 in September 1999. 

Membership and meetings
The BSI Fortran Panel has 26 members, including observers.  Most of the
panel's business is conducted by e-mail and it meets only when there are
issues to be resolved which cannot be decided otherwise.  There have
been no panel meetings since the last WG5 meeting.  One member is also
an active member of J3.

The project editors for the two active Technical Reports and for part 2
of the Fortran standard are members of the BSI panel.  Development work
has continued during the past year.

JTC1 and SC22 votes
BSI voted as follows in the Fortran-related ballots since the last WG5
meeting:

PDTR Registration and PDTR Ballot for PDTR 15580    yes
PDTR Registration and PDTR Ballot for PDTR 15581    yes, subject to
                                                    correction of title
DTR Ballot for DTR 15580                            yes
DTR Ballot for DTR 15581                            yes
Ballot on ISO/IEC FDIS 1539-2                       yes, subject to
                                                    correction of Foreword
                                                    supplied by ITTF

British adoption of Fortran 95
BSI has a policy of adopting ISO standards also as British standards. 
IST/5, the UK counterpart of SC22, has been trying for some time to
persuade BSI that programming language standards are international in
nature and that there is no technical reason for having a separate
British (or European) standard.  BSI also has the policy of not adopting
an ISO standard until it has been endorsed as an EN (European standard). 
This bureaucracy has caused a delay in adopting Fortran 95 as a British
standard.  This has no technical effect, but could have legal
implications, for example for contracts. 

British Computer Society Fortran Specialist Group
The British Computer Society Fortran Specialist Group has 220 members. 
It has held one meeting during the year, at which two members of the BSI
panel gave presentations.

                                                David Muxworthy
                                                IST/5/-/5 (Fortran) Convenor
                                                August 7, 2000