ISO/IEC JTC1/SC22/WG5 N1632 WG5 Business Plan and Convener's Report to the ISO/IEC JTC1/SC22 2005 Plenary PERIOD COVERED BY THIS REPORT: August 2004 to July 2005. SUBMITTED BY: John Reid 1 MANAGEMENT SUMMARY 1.1 JTC1/SC22/WG5 Statement of Scope The development and maintenance of ISO/IEC Fortran programming language standards. 1.2 Project Report 1.2.1 Completed Projects 22.02.01.01 Programming Language Fortran - Part 1: Base language The requirements for the revision of the base Fortran Standard (IS 1539-1:1997), referred to informally as Fortran 2003, were agreed by WG5 at its meeting in Las Vegas, USA, in February 1997. In accordance with WG5's agreed strategic policy, the development of the draft standard was delegated to INCITS/J3, acting as WG5's Primary Development Body. After rescheduling in 1999, the target date for final publication was December 2004 and this was achieved slightly ahead of schedule. It was published on Nov 18 as ISO/IEC 1539-1:2004(E) and is in the ISO on-line catalogue, price CHF 340. The final stages did not run as smoothly as we wished. The DIS, together with a Disposition of Comments Report from the FCD ballot was sent to the Secretariat on 13 May 2004 and she sent it to ISO for DIS balloting on 17 May, but the ballot did not commence until 12 July. It ran to 12 September and it passed 17-0. Two further months delay then occurred before publication, during which communication with ISO was poor. The editor wished to make 6 purely typographical corrections and offered to send a new pdf file. He also wished to correct 7 differences in pagination between the DIS and the version with line numbers (that is likely to be used exclusively by the committees in preference to the ISO version without them). This offer was not accepted, but most of the requested corrections were made. However, the "hot links" that were in the PDF sent to ISO were not in the published version, which resulted in several user complaints. Later, ISO asked the editor if he could produce a revised PDF with the hot links, but this was impractical because the lack of prior coordination meant that all the editing done by ISO would have had to be redone in the LaTeX source used by WG5 to produce the hot-linked PDF. This would have led to pagination differences. 22.02.01.05 Type 2 Technical Report on Enhanced Module Facilities The TR on Enhanced Module Facilities was published on Feb 15 as ISO/IEC TR 19767:2005(E) and is in the ISO on-line catalogue, price CHF 75. The principal aims are to enable decomposing large and interconnected facilities into tractable units, avoid 'recompilation cascades' when a single module of a very large program is altered, assist packaging proprietary software, and ease library creation and maintenance. Again, the final stages did not run as smoothly as we wished. It was the subject of a DTR ballot that ran from 18 June 2004 to 18 August 2004. This was passed with 13 yeses without comments, 0 yeses with comments, 0 nos, and 6 abstentions. The editor was asked to provide a new version with some editorial changes in the Foreword and a change of fonts. This was sent on 1 September 2004. A proof prepared from this was not sent until 15 December 2004. We responded to this on 23 December with a short list of substantive changes and a short list of non-substantive changes. The editor offered a new version with all these changes included, but this was not accepted. Only the substantive changes were made. 1.2.2 Projects Underway 22.02.01.01 Programming Language Fortran - Part 1: Base language The primary responsibility for maintenance of Fortran 2003 has been delegated to INCITS/J3. Our procedure is that each interpretation request is first considered by J3. Once a response has been agreed at a J3 meeting, a J3 letter ballot is held, and if this is successful it is followed by an informal WG5 vote. A vote is deemed to have failed if there are any no votes with reasons that have not so far been considered. This gives plenty of scope for detailed analysis and gives the result good credibility. 30 interpretations had passed all these stages by the end of the May 2005 meeting and the first corrigendum was prepared. Defect Report 1 for Fortran 2003 (ISO/IEC JTC1/SC22/WG5 N1640) contains responses to all these and the corresponding edits are collected in the first draft corrigendum for Fortran 2003 (ISO/IEC JTC1/SC22/WG5 N1641). They are currently being balloted (ISO/IEC JTC 1/SC22 N3905), with due date 31 August 2005. At the time of writing (July 2005) there are 33 interpretations being processed. It was agreed at the May 2004 meeting of WG5 that the next revision should be minor (as was Fortran 95 as a revision of Fortran 90) with a target publication date of 2009. WG5 is already committed to including the enhanced module facilities of its TR. A Repository of Requirements (Standing Document 5) has been established and revised several times; the latest version is ISO/IEC JTC1/SC22/WG5 N1626. It contains 49 items from USA, 6 items from the Russian Federation, and 10 items from the UK. They have all been allocated an integer 'severity level' (see WG5 N1594) that varies between 7 for a technical change likely to need more than 2 years to develop to 3 for a very minor technical change. At the meeting in May 2005, all items at level 4 and above and many of those at level 3 were considered. 16 were chosen definitely, the most significant of which was co-arrays for parallel processing (level 6). 17 were chosen subject to J3 time permitting, and 12 were excluded definitely. The plan is to make a final choice at the next meeting (Feb. 2006) 22.02.01.05 Type 2 Technical Report on Enhanced Module Facilities With the publication of the TR on Enhanced Module Facilities, this now enters a maintenance stage. 22.02.02 Programming Language Fortran - Part 2: Varying Length Character Strings Features of Fortran 2003 cover almost all the requirements for which Part 2 was written. However, the new standard has not yet been published and it is likely to be several years before compilers will be widely available. Therefore, WG5 continues to have responsibility for maintenance, but there have been no interpretation requests. 22.02.03 Programming Language Fortran - Part 3: Conditional Compilation Now that the revision of the base language has been published, a minor revision of this part may be appropriate, but work on this has not commenced. WG5 continues to have responsibility for maintenance, but there have been no interpretation requests. 1.2.3 Projects Withdrawn None. 1.3 Cooperation and Competition WG5 cooperates closely with the ANSI INCITS/J3 Fortran Technical Committee, to whom it has delegated the technical development of Fortran as well as the maintenance of Fortran 2003 (ISO/IEC 1539-1:2004(E)). There is also close contact with the industry-driven HPF and OpenMP Architecture Review Board, with several members of the Board also being members of J3 and/or WG5. For example, the OpenMP board has aligned the OpenMP 2.0 Release with Fortran 95. Many of those responsible for the development of commercial Fortran compilers are members of J3 and/or WG5. Other important liaisons are those with IFIP WG2.5 (Numerical Software), IEEE 754 (Floating-point hardware), ANSI INCITS/H2 (Data base), and ANSI INCITS/J11 (C) There are no competitive activities. 2 PERIOD REVIEW 2.1 Market Requirements Fortran is the language of choice for much scientific, engineering, and economic programming, particularly for very large programs that have evolved over many years. The long delay between the release of Fortran 77 and the availability of Fortran 90 compilers, at a time when other languages, such as C and C++, were evolving rapidly, had a significant impact on the use of Fortran, but there are now clear signs that the facilities available in Fortran 90 and Fortran 95 are causing a growing number of scientific and technological users to move towards these latest versions of Fortran. Vendors have upgraded their Fortran 90 compilers to Fortran 95, most of them have incorporated the extensions of TR 15581 (allocatable array extensions), and some have incorporated the extensions of TR 15580 (exception handling and support of IEEE floating-point arithmetic). Some have begun implementing the new features of Fortran 2003. Most major Fortran compiler vendors are represented either on WG5 or its Primary Development Body, INCITS/J3, as are two of the major research establishments that rely on Fortran for their scientific computing. In addition to vendor-supplied and specific mailing lists, there is an active email list and an active usenet newsgroup for users of Fortran, which provide valuable feedback from users. All these diverse sources are being used to guide the development of the language, both through revisions to the base language Standard, and through other related standards and technical reports. 2.2 Achievements The Fortran standard has passed a significant milestone with the publication of the Fortran 2003 standard. Similarly, the TR on enhanced module facilities has passed a significant milestone with its publication. 2.3 Resources As elsewhere in the Standardization world, it is becoming increasingly difficult to persuade employers to provide the necessary funding for Standards activity. The number of employers, especially among compiler vendors, continues to decline through corporate mergers and acquisitions. WG5 delegates most of the technical work involved in developing Standards and Technical Reports to 'development bodies' which are either based on a national Fortran committee, as in the case of INCITS/J3, or consist of a (small) multinational group under the leadership of the relevant project editor. WG5 currently has one such active development body (the primary development body) developing standards, and four development bodies monitoring published standards and technical reports for maintenance purposes. WG5 itself carries out much of its discussions via email, with an annual meeting, usually during the summer, and occasional other meetings at critical stages in the development of the base language standard. The meeting in May 2005 was attended by 23 members, including the Convener, representing 6 member bodies. 3 FOCUS FOR NEXT WORK PERIOD 3.1 Deliverables It is envisaged that the second corrigendum for Part 1 will be submitted in the summer of 2006. It is envisaged that a new work item for the revision of Part 1 will be submitted in the summer of 2006. 3.2 Strategies WG5 operates under a strategic plan described in WG5 Standing Document 4, the latest version of which is WG5 N1349. In particular, the revision of the base Standard, IS 1539-1, is delegated to ANSI INCITS/J3 operating as WG5's Primary Development Body, while the other projects for which WG5 is responsible are handled by other Development Bodies, which liaise with the Primary Development Body as required. 3.2.1 Risks As far as possible, WG5 tries to anticipate technical comments during international ballots by holding informal ballots of its members before any documents are submitted for ballot. Nevertheless, unexpected technical comments can always delay the planned schedule. 3.2.2 Opportunities WG5 has made extensive use of email for over a decade to speed up technical development. Since 1995 most documents have been distributed via an official file server in the UK; all documents have been distributed in this way since 1997. An open web site is also used to provide non-technical, and other publicly available, information to interested parties. In addition to speeding up the distribution of documents, the use of electronic distribution and communication systems also provides many other benefits, such as the ability to rapidly carry out informal ballots of the members for various reasons. 3.2.3 Work Program Priorities WG5's priority activities this year are the maintenance of the base Fortran language Standard, ISO/IEC 1539-1:2004(E) and the consideration of items submitted to the Repository as candidates for the next revision. 4. ADMINISTRATIVE INFORMATION 4.1 WG5 Liaisons See Section 1.3. 4.2 Recent Meetings 2003/07/28-08/01 Dresden, Germany 2004/05/02-07 Las Vegas, USA 2005/05/9-13 Delft, Netherlands 4.3 Future Meetings 2006/02/13-17 George Mason University, USA 2007/07 or 2007/08 London, UK Note that WG5 normally meets annually, with extra meetings being held as/when necessary to process ballot comments or other high priority activities that do not accord with the regular meeting schedule. WG5's Primary Development Body, INCITS/J3, meets quarterly. Other work is carried out via email. 5. SC22 PLENARY ACTIONS RELATED TO WG5 5.1 Free availability of three TRs and a Corrigendum WG5 requests that WG5's three Type 2 TRs be made freely available. They are: ISO/IEC TR 15580:2001 ISO/IEC TR 15581:2001 ISO/IEC TR 19767:2005 It also requests that if the Technical Corrigendum that is currently being balloted is published that this be made freely available. 5.2 Change of editor for Part 1 of the Fortran standard WG5 requests that Malcolm Cohen, NAG, UK, be appointed as editor of Part 1 in succession to Richard Maine who stepped down with the publication of Fortran 2003. 5.3 Delays during the final stages of publication of standards ISO has made it very clear to committee secretaries that time is of the essence in standards development. Therefore WG5 requests SC22 to discuss with the ISO secretariat the delays that WG5 experienced in the final stages of publication of both Fortran 2003 and the TR (see Section 1.2.1 of this report) and to seek improvements.