ISO/IEC JTC1/SC22/WG5-N1807

                       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, USA, February 15 - 19, 2010

Membership and meetings
Membership of the BSI Fortran Panel remains at 19, 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 email and it meets only when there are issues to be
resolved which cannot be decided otherwise.

JTC1 and SC22 ballots
In common with other active member bodies, the UK voted 'no' on
Technical Corrigendum 4 for Fortran 2003 because of its minor faults.
This did not seriously delay publication of the document.

The UK voted to disapprove the Fortran 2008 FCD (see below).

Activity
Since the last WG5 meeting the principal activity of the panel has
been discussion of the Fortran FCD.  The result of an initial round of
voting was 5-5-1.  After it was confirmed that 'abstention with
comments' was not a permissible vote and after further prolonged
discussion, the final vote was 3-8-0.  This recommendation was
accepted by the BSI Programming Languages Committee and forwarded to
SC22 as the UK vote.

A prime concern of the panel was the disparity between the content of
the FCD and the state of existing implementations of the current
standard together with vendors' development plans, so far as they are
known.  The FCD will not, in the short to medium term, be able to
fulfil its prime purpose as the basis for portability of programs.  To
ameliorate the situation we have suggested a new project to define a
portable subset of the language.

The other main concern, of the majority but not all of the panel, was
that coarrays are deemed to be mandatory in the language rather than
optional.  That they should not be part of the base language has been
proposed repeatedly by the UK, including in the vote on the CD, but
WG5 has not been persuaded.  Nevertheless this is such a strongly held
view that it is repeated in this vote.

Language Vulnerabilities DTR 24772
Members of the Fortran panel are contributing to the UK discussion on
the vote on the Language Vulnerabilities DTR which is still ongoing at
the time of writing.

Bletchley Park Archive
The UK National Museum of Computing at Bletchley Park is now able to
accept documents for its archive.  A number of Fortran standards
documents, minutes of committee meetings and the like have been
deposited there since the last WG5 meeting.

Acknowledgement
The BSI Fortran Panel gratefully acknowledges financial support from
the British Computer Society Specialist Groups Executive Committee.

David Muxworthy
IST/5/-/5 (Fortran) Convenor
February 1, 2010