ISO/IEC JTC1/SC22/WG5-N1757

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

          UK National Activity Report presented to the meeting of
  ISO/IEC JTC1/SC22/WG5 (Fortran), Tokyo, Japan, November 16 - 21, 2008


Membership and meetings
Membership of the BSI Fortran Panel has changed since the last WG5
meeting but the total remains at 19 members, including observers.  One
member of the BSI Panel is also an alternate member of J3 and one
member is WG5 convenor.  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.

JTC1 and SC22 ballots
Since the last WG5 meeting the formal BSI votes have been to approve
Technical Corrigendum 3 and to disapprove the Base Language CD; the
rationale for the latter vote is in WG5-N1740 (aka SC22 N4405).

Activity
When the Fortran CD was made available for public comment, a trawl for
input from UK Fortran users was made on comp.lang.fortran,
comp-fortran-90 and the BCS Fortran Specialist Group members' list and
website.  Announcements calling for comment were also made at various
computing meetings.  There was a response from eight individuals
outside the Fortran panel, one of whom summarized discussion at a
related physics conference.

This disappointing total was generally assumed to be due to users not
yet having come to terms with Fortran 2003 and hence displaying little
interest as yet in Fortran 2008.  One public comment contained a
proposal for a minor enhanced feature which has been forwarded for
consideration by WG5.

Despite the progress made at the August 2007 and February 2008 WG5
meetings, and despite discussions based on hundreds of email messages,
it has not been possible to come to a consensus in favour of the
Fortran Base Language CD.  Indeed, both amongst panel members and
those members of the public who commented, there are still strong
divisions of opinion on the document with most of the UK panel
continuing to have serious concerns. These are summarized in WG5-N1740
and hence are not repeated here.

Acknowledgement
The BSI Fortran Panel gratefully acknowledges financial support for
two of its members at this meeting from the British Computer Society
Specialist Groups Executive Committee, JKR Associates and Polyhedron
Software Ltd.


David Muxworthy
IST/5/-/5 (Fortran) Convenor
November 10, 2008