N2168

JAPAN'S PROPOSALS FOR THE NEXT REVISION OF THE FORTRAN STANDARD
August 2019


IPSJ/ITSCJ SC 22/Fortran WG believes the next revision of the Fortran 
standard should be a minor one for the following reason.

  At present, most of vendor implementations have not reached the full 
  specification of Fortran 2008. And implementations of Fortran 2018
  should require considerable time. 

  Under the conditions above, making a major revision to the standard
  will further widen the time gap between the latest features and 
  implementations. The gap reduces the portability of the standard and
  the value of the latest features. Vendors are not motivated to appeal
  to users the advantages of the features that they will not offer for 
  years. Users will not be interested in the features that do not appear
  for years.

However, minor extensions whose needs are commonly agreed should be 
discussed whether they are added. We believe the minor extensions 
worth discussing if they will serve the following purposes:

- help for compiler optimizations, or removal of factors that inhibit
  optimizations

- improvement of the usability without hindering compiler optimizations