The major features of the next revision of Fortran

Abstract

Two important meetings for the next revision of Fortran were held recently. WG5 met jointly with J3 in Fairfax, Virginia, Feb. 13-17 and J3 met in Las Vegas, May 8-12.The framework was decided at last years' WG5 meeting and was not substantially changed at this year's WG5 meeting. Two large items (bits and intelligent macros) were left as do if time, which made the May J3 meeting important, since the schedule that we have adopted (aiming for the revision to be Fortran 2008) demanded that edits against Fortran 2003 for all the new features be completed at that meeting.In the event both were deemed to be ready, but interoperability of pointers, allocatables, assumed-shape arrays, and optional arguments was not ready and will be deferred to a Technical Report.There was a discussion at the J3 meeting over moving co-arrays to a Technical Report or another part of the standard, despite the WG5 decision at the February meeting that it be a first priority item. However, the major vendors reported pressure from users to provide co-arrays and it was decided (straw vote 6-3-2) to keep them. A significant argument was that it would be unsatisfactory to renege on the decision of last year that co-arrays would be there.This seems a good moment to give a quick summary of the new features. For further details, see the WG5 repositoryftp://ftp.nag.co.uk/sc22wg5/N1601-N1650/N1649.txtand the J3 Work Planhttp://j3-fortran.org/doc/meeting/176/06-010r2.pdfEach of the items in the Repository has been given an estimated severity level, as defined in N1594. I will devote separate sections to the three large items (above level 5) and list those with severity level 4 or 5.