ISO/IEC JTC1/SC22/WG5-N2256

                 UK Activity Report, 2025-2026

The BSI (British Standards Institute) Fortran Group has met three
times since the final meeting reported in N2242. It met on 15/09/25,
19/01/26, and 02/03/26. In all these meetings, the main topic was the
workplan for the next standard. We found the J3 standing Document 10 
very useful for following progress and welcomed the updates in 2025 and 
January 2026, but regretted that it was out-of-date at the time of our
meeting.  

At the final meeting, we reviewed all the items in the plan and noted
that many have passed all the stages including the inclusion of
edits in the new draft standard. We would like to express our 
appreciation of the hard work by J3 that this involved. We noted that 
J3 recommends that these items
   US13 Scoped access to module entities
   US18 Allow Polymorphism in Coarrays
   DIN3a Add support for atomic operations in local memory
be removed from the plan but considered for inclusion in a future
revision. We hope that WG5 will support these recommendations and 
noted that these items
   US06 Provide a mechanism to specify global binding name for non 
        C-interoperable
   US07 Improve rank-independent functionality 
   US24 Add rank-independent looping 
have made no progress. We recommend that these, too, be removed from 
the plan but considered for inclusion in a future revision. 
Further, the item
   US10 Define a standard Fortran preprocessor 
has made significant progress but syntax and edits are not yet
available. To avoid delaying the present revision, we recommend this 
item be deferred to the next revision. 

The Group regrets that ANSI rules no longer permit WG5 and J3 to have 
joint meetings, which allowed more efficient use of our scarce 
resources. However, we welcome the decision this year to split the WG5 
meeting to allow it to meet before and after the J3 meeting. We hope 
that the first part of the meeting will decide to remove the 7 items 
highlighted above from the plan for Fortran 2028 so that our resources 
can be focused on reviewing the draft standard with its current 
features to meet the agreed schedule, see N2248.