ISO/IEC JTC1/SC22/WG5-N1514
        
                  BRITISH STANDARDS INSTITUTION
            COMMITTEE ON PROGRAMMING LANGUAGES (IST/5)
        
        UK National Activity Report presented to the meeting of
ISO/IEC JTC1/SC22/WG5 (Fortran), Las Vegas, NV, March 30 - April 4, 2003

Membership and meetings
The BSI Fortran Panel has 22 members, including observers.  The panel's
business is normally conducted by e-mail and it meets only when there
are issues to be resolved which cannot be decided otherwise.  There has
been one panel meeting since the last WG5 meeting. 

SC22 ballot
As members of WG5 will know from WG5-N1506, the BSI vote in the
concurrent registration and approval ballot for CD 1539-1 Fortran -
Part 1 was "yes" for registration and "yes with comments" for approval. 
A national appeal for comments was made by e-mail in September and the
comments received were condensed into the UK vote at a Fortran panel
meeting in December.  It was decided that the UK ballot document should
contain mainly comments on the content of the language, classified into
11 suggested technical changes, 15 minor technical changes and 22 edits,
and that detailed edits corresponding to the proposed technical changes
should follow as papers for this meeting.  This accounts for the large
number of papers submitted by the UK Fortran Panel. 

British adoption of Fortran 95
As reported to the last WG5 meeting, Fortran 95 was formally issued as a
British Standard in November 2001.  The policy of reissuing
international standards as domestic standards has no technical merit and
the BSI Programming Languages Committee has continually argued against
it.  However there appear to be legal reasons for the practice.  Fortran
95 is printed with the two technical corrigenda bound in as appendices. 
Unfortunately the appendices are described as "informative" rather than
"normative".  The panel has asked that this be changed for future print
runs. 

Reduced Price Language Standards
In April 2002, in an effort to boost sales of programming language
standards, BSI reduced the hard copy price of most standards of more
than 100 pages to GBP40 (reduced from GBP198 in the case of Fortran). 
The experiment has not had a significant effect on sales of the Fortran
Standard. 

British Computer Society Fortran Specialist Group 
The British Computer Society Fortran Specialist Group held a Fortran
Forum in London on October 30, 2002 at which the principal new features
of Fortran 2000 were presented and discussed.  The speakers,
presentations and venue were all first class. The number of
participants (25) was disappointingly low, but the discussion was
lively and thoughtful. General satisfaction with progress was
expressed, together with a determination not to suggest anything that
might 'rock the boat' or delay the schedule. A number of suggestions
for changes, based on straw votes at the Forum, were included in the UK
vote in the SC22 ballot.

David Muxworthy
IST/5/-/5 (Fortran) Convenor
March 20, 2003