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.

Comments

What is Fortran used for these days?

[beanerspace]

As a programmer who cut his teeth on good-old K&R C back in the 80's and has been fortunate/unfortunate enough to avoid shooting himself in the foot with Fortran and/or Cobol ... I have 2 questions?

1. What are the compelling reasons to use Fortran in 2002?
   
2. Do they differ much from the use of Fortran in the past?
   
3. Is it the same language as the Fortran of prior decades?
   
4. Can someone summarize without the tech-eze the future of Fortran - especially in light of the aforementioned Fortran 2000 Committee Draft?
   

Just curious I guess.

Re:As they say...

[DaveAtFraud]

The original quote appeared in an issue of Scientific American that came out in the late 1990s. The article was on, you guessed it, the amazing longevity of FORTRAN. The bottom line is that there are a fantastic number of huge FORTRAN libraries out in the real world for doing all sorts of number crunching. The libraries are well understood, any bad behavior at boundary conditions is documented and they have a lot of milage on them so the results are generally regarded as valid. It makes far more sense to keep something called FORTRAN around that is compatible with this code than is does to attempt to re-write and re-test.

Oh, and no one cares that there isn't a pretty GUI interface to programs for analyzing structural stress, heat flow analysis, doing x-ray crystalography, etc.