Readers of this mailing list will have seen the announcement that the
Final Committee Draft of the proposed revised Fortran standard (Fortran
2003) is now available for public comment. As a reminder, the document
is at http://www.dkuug.dk/jtc1/sc22/open/n3661.pdf (4.0Mb) and is also
available from ftp://ftp.j3-fortran.org/j3/doc/standing/007/ in
compressed pdf, postscript and plain text formats (file sizes
respectively 2.2Mb, 1.0Mb, 394Kb).

Formal balloting is via the member bodies of ISO. This is to invite
those in the UK to contribute to the BSI vote by sending comments to
the BSI Fortran convenor, e-mail d.muxworthy _at_ bcs.org.uk where _at_
should be replaced by the usual symbol. This is essentially the last
chance to make any changes to the document before it emerges as the new
Fortran standard in late 2004.

Readers who have not been following recent developments in detail might
useful a summary of the principal new features of the language. This
is at
ftp://ftp.nag.co.uk/sc22wg5/N1551-N1600/N1579.pdf or
ftp://ftp.nag.co.uk/sc22wg5/N1551-N1600/N1579.ps.gz (file sizes 101Kb
and 59Kb respectively)

At this stage of proceedings, ISO/IEC guidelines indicate that only
editorial or very minor technical changes should be made to the
document but the standards committees would be very pleased to receive
suggestions for such things as clarifying descriptions, for very minor
regularization of language features or for help in identifying any
typographical errors.

Material for the UK ballot should ideally be sent as soon as possible
and must arrive no later than Friday 16 January 2004. Contributors are
welcome to comment more than once; it is preferable for the BSI Fortran
panel to receive multiple small messages throughout the comment period
than to receive a few large messages at the end of it. Please use
plain ascii rather than formatted text. Suggestions for changes must
include proposed replacement text.

Readers outside the UK should submit comments through their own
standards body. The following are also 'participating' members of the
ISO Programming Languages Committee and have votes on the Fortran FCD:
Austria, Belgium, Brazil, Canada, China, Czech Republic, Denmark,
Egypt, Finland, France, Germany, Ireland, Italy, Japan, DPR of Korea,
Republic of Korea, Netherlands, Norway, Russian Federation, Romania,
Slovenia, Switzerland, Ukraine, USA. In addition the following are
'observer' members and are permitted but are not obliged to vote:
Argentina, Bulgaria, Cuba, Estonia, Greece, Hungary, Iceland, India,
Indonesia, Israel, Kenya, New Zealand, Poland, Serbia and Montenegro,
Singapore, Sweden, Thailand, Turkey.

A full list of ISO members is at:
http://www.iso.ch/iso/en/aboutiso/isomembers/
MemberList.MemberSummary?MEMBERCODE=10
However in case of difficulty please send comments to one of the
published Fortran contact addresses. It is more important that Fortran
users worldwide make their views known than they are prevented from
doing so by bureaucracy.

David Muxworthy
BSI Fortran Convenor