Van Snyder write:
> The November J3 meeting is the last "legal" chance to add anything of
> substance -- anything other than editorial corrections, and changes
> due to "integration."
>
Now that a new wish list for Fortran 2000/200X is started again, I
resubmit again a feature that I think is important to be added to
Fortran 2000.
If we examine the "wish list" of the most requested features in Fortran,
a particularly recurring theme is the addition of facilities for
accessing binary stream files (unformatted files without any record
structure). Such files are currently awkward to create or access using
the current I/O facilities offered by Fortran 95. For example, accessing
some "industry standard" file formats such as TIFF for digital images
needs rather convoluted and inefficient code if conformance to the
standard is required.
As a result of this need, the majority of Fortran 90/95 implementations
have been extended to allow a "binary" or "transparent" file access for
accessing this kind of files.
In 1996, I have sent a proposal to X3J3 to implement this feature.
The suggestion is still on the J3 reference material for Fortran 2000
but it's implementation has now a very low priority.
You may check at:
ftp://ftp.dfrc.nasa.gov/pub/x3j3/wg5/ftp.nag.co.uk/N1151-N1200/Text/N1189.txt
for proposal 63a
Because of the user requests for this feature and the fact that many
existing implementations (such as DEC) already provides this facility,
the priority should be raised in order to get binary stream I/O
standardized in F2000.
Regards,
Jean Vezina
%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%
|