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FORTRAN 2003 Accepted as Standard
GraWil writes "Despite the nay sayers citing its death in 1965, the FORTRAN standards committee has now released the final FORTRAN 2003 specification. In an announcement to the comp.lang.fortran group, Michael Metcalf annouced that 'Fortran 2003 has passed its ballot with flying colours: 20 yeses, 0 noes, 8 abstains.' Strictly speaking, the 2003 and past standards are not freely available but drafts can be found online. FORTRAN 2003 is an upwardly-compatible extension of the current standard, FORTRAN 95, adding and extending support for exception handling, object-oriented programming, and improved interoperability with the C language. In other FORTRAN news, the GNU FORTRAN 95 compiler has made amazing progress over the past year. Gfortran will be part of gcc-4.0 when released (probably in 2005)." -
Fortran 2000 Committee Draft
Richard Maine writes "John Reid, convenor of the ISO Fortran standards comittee, has posted the following announcement to some Fortran-related forums: 'I am pleased to tell you that the draft Fortran 2000 standard is now out for comment. ... The J3 (USA Fortran committee) version, which is identical except for the title page and the headers and footers, is available in ps, pdf, text, or source (latex). This is a very significant milestone for Fortran 2000. It is a major extension of Fortran 95 that has required a significant amount of development work by the J3. ... The abstract of the revision, which lists the major enhancements is appended. I have written an informal description of the new features, which will be published in the next issue of Fortran Forum (about to appear).'"The formal position is that a CD (Committee Draft) Registration and Approval Ballot is in progress. The deadline for comments (from national bodies) is 27 December. Each national body will have its own deadline ahead of 27 December, so be sure to submit your personal comments to your national body well before then. For the USA, they should be sent to Deborah Donovan, email: ddonovan@itic.org. For the UK, they should be sent to David Muxworthy, email: d.muxworthy@ed.ac.uk.
John Reid, ISO/IEC JTC1/SC22/WG5 Convener
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ISO/IEC JTC1/SC22/WG5 N1494
Committee Draft revision of ISO/IEC 1539-1:1997 - Programming Language Fortran - Part 1: Base language
Abstract
Fortran is a computer language for scientific and technical programming that is tailored for efficient run-time execution on a wide variety of processors. It was first standardized in 1966 and the standard has since been revised three times (1978, 1991, 1997). The revision of 1991 was major and those of 1978 and 1997 were relatively minor. This proposed fourth revision is major and has been made following a meeting of ISO/IEC JTC1/SC22/WG5 in 1997 that considered all the requirements of users, as expressed through their national bodies.
The significant enhancements in the 1991 revision were dynamic storage, structures, derived types, pointers, type parameterization, modules, and array language. The main thrust of the 1997 revision was in connection with alignment with HPF (High Performance Fortran).
The major enhancements for this revision are
(1) Derived type enhancements: parameterized derived types, improved control of accessibility, improved structure constructors, and finalizers.
(2) Object oriented programming support: type extension and inheritance, polymorphism, dynamic type allocation, and type-bound procedures.
(3) Data manipulation enhancements: allocatable components, deferred type parameters, VOLATILE attribute, explicit type specification in array constructors, pointer enhancements, extended initialization expressions, and enhanced intrinsic procedures.
(4) Input/output enhancements: asynchronous transfer, stream access, user specified transfer operations for derived types, user specified control of rounding during format conversions, named constants for preconnected units, the flush statement, regularization of keywords, and access to error messages.
(5) Procedure pointers.
(6) Support for IEC 60559 (IEEE 754) exceptions.
(7) Interoperability with the C programming language.
(8) Support for international usage: access to ISO 10646 4-byte characters and choice of decimal or comma in numeric formatted input/output.
(9) Enhanced integration with the host operating system: access to command line arguments, environment variables, and processor error messages.
In addition, there are numerous minor enhancements.
Except in extremely minor ways, this revision is upwards compatible with the current standard, that is, a program that conforms to the present standard will conform to the revised standard.
The enhancements are in response to demands from users and will keep Fortran appropriate for the needs of present-day programmers without losing the vast investment in existing programs.