The fortunes of Fortran have changed markedly over the last two years. An increasingly gloomy outlook for the new standard, Fortran 8x, culminated in a complete impasse in the summer of 1988. The deadlock was broken as the result of firm action by the international community and X3J3's positive response to that pressure. In this paper, the consequent changes which have been made to the draft standard since last autumn will be outlined.
1. Standardization
draft standard to X3, before that committee can consider it. Once X3 agrees to begin considera-At the last conference in this series, I reported tion, a period of public comment is initiated, and on the state of the work on the new Fortran X3J3 is required to take note of and act on the standard, and described the new features it was public comments, and to resubmit a revised draft planned to contain [1]. Since that time a number for consideration by X3. This cycle can be reof significant developments have taken place, and peated several times. I shall describe those events which have occurred Formally, X3J3 is currently at the fourteenth of both in the American technical committee, X3J3, the eighteen milestones which have to be passed and at the international level, before a new standard receives full international X3J3 is a body composed of about forty-five recognition, and there are still those objecting that representatives of computer hardware and soft-the advances it has made have gone too far. A ware vendors, users, and academia. As its work ballot held in January 1987 -29 to 7 -showed achieves more prominence, its membership rises that no true consensus had been achieved in the meeting by meeting. It is accredited to ANSI, the committee, and many of the dissenting votes were body which publishes final American standards, those of large vendors claiming to act as reprebut reports directly to its parent committee, X3, sentatives of their users. This failure to agree was which is responsible for actually adopting, or re-confirmed in the final ballot to forward the docujecting, the proposed draft standards presented to ment to X3, held in May 1987: 26 to 9, a sufficient it. In these decisions, X3 tries to ensure that the but not overwhelming result. A complete descripproposals really do represent a consensus of those tion of this version of the language is given in ref.
concerned. The work of X3J3 is tracked by a
[2]. corresponding international group, ISO/IEC In its turn, X3 decided by a large majority to JTC1/SC22/WG5, consisting of international ex-allow the first draft standard to go to public perts responsible for recommending that a draft comment, and over 400 letters were received. Many standard becomes an international standard as shades of opinion were represented in these rewell as a national one. X3J3 maintains other close plies, but a general feeling was that the language contacts with the international community by hay-was too complex, lacked certain existing, popular ing half-a-dozen foreign members.
features, and was burdened by other features which As part of the lengthy standardization proce-were unattractive. As a result of this rather soberdure, it is necessary to gain at least a two-thirds ing experience, a number of members of X3J3 majority of X3J3 to be able to forward a proposed attempted to prepare plans to respond in various