I am pleased to tell you that the draft Fortran 2000 standard is now
out for comment. The official version is available from

     http://www.dkuug.dk/jtc1/sc22/open/n3501.pdf

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) from

       ftp://ftp.j3-fortran.org/j3/doc/standing/007/

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 main features were decided at a meeting
of the ISO Fortran committee WG5 in 1997.

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).
It is also available from

   ftp://ftp.nag.co.uk/sc22wg5/N1451-N1500/N1495.pdf

It is an unofficial document written by me and has not been formally
approved by either WG5 or J3.  If you base a comment on what I say,
check with the draft standard in case I got it wrong.

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: [log in to unmask]  For the
UK, they should be sent to David Muxworthy, email:
[log in to unmask]



John Reid,  ISO/IEC JTC1/SC22/WG5 Convener


........................................................................



                                            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.