John K. Reid
Convener, ISO Fortran Committee
Atlas Centre, Rutherford Appleton Laboratory, UK
j.k.reid@rl.ac.uk
There is plenty happening just now with respect to Fortran. Two sets of features (for exception handling and for enhancements to allocatable arrays) were defined in Technical Reports (sort of mini standards) as extensions to Fortran 95 and have become widely available in compilers.
The features of Fortran 2003 have been chosen and the standard is very near completion. As well as the contents of the two Technical Reports, this adds interoperability with C, parameterized derived types, procedure pointers, type extension and polymorphism, access to the computing environment, support of international character sets, and many other enhancements.
Another Technical Report is near completion, to enhance the module features and avoid the 'compilation cascade' that can mar the development of very large programs. This is written as an extension of Fortran 2003, but is expected to be widely implememnted as an extension to Fortran 95 compilers.
We will summarize all these developments, which will make Fortran even more suitable for large numerically-demanding applications.
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Jerzy Wasniewski
2004-01-23