A report on the joint WG5 and PL22.3 meeting June 2013, Delft, Netherlands

After the long hiatus in the 1980s it was decided, partly to prevent a recurrence and partly to keep more closely to ISO schedules, that future revisions of the Fortran standard should be alternately major and minor. Thus Fortran 2008 was scheduled to be minor especially as vendors were struggling to implement all of the 2003 standard before it was superseded. In the event the 2008 standard turned out to be larger than expected, mainly because the impact of coarrays had not been appreciated. During development of the standard coarrays had proved to be controversial, and there were conflicting proposals to remove them altogether, to put them in a separate part of the standard or to move all or some of the facilities to a Technical Report. In February 2008 in order to achieve consensus it was finally agreed to keep a core set of features in the main language and to develop a TR to “cater for the other features plus possibly those suggested by public comment” with the expectation that the TR would be published some three years later. Subsequently ISO renamed ‘Technical Reports’ to be ‘Technical Specifications’. Incidentally ‘consensus’ is defined by ISO to be ‘absence of sustained opposition’; it does not necessarily imply unanimity.