Giles wrote:

> There are *lots* of Fortran
> programmers.  What percentage even know about the committee?
> Posting something where few people look is not the same as
> publicity.

Essentially every milestone is posted in this forum and at comp.lang.fortran.

Just last week, I posted the web addresses for J3 and WG5 in this forum.
Here they are again:

  http://www.j3-fortran.org
  ftp://ftp.nag.co.uk/sc22wg5

If you care about something, go look it up.  The web addresses are posted
here and elsewhere frequently, and, as Dan pointed out, within the top
ten hits from Google for "Fortran committee" one finds the J3 web site.
The top hit for "Fortran" alone is www.fortran.com.  One link away, under
"Information", the second line is "Standards activities (J3, ISO/WG5,
HPF, IFIP WG 2.5)".  For many many years, Mike Metcalf sent a letter
quarterly to this very mailing list about Fortran, which letter included
announcements of standards activities.

> The committee should engage in *lots* of publicity.
> That's the only way to get real public interest.

Instead of sniveling that the people who are already doing a ton of work
aren't doing enough, try pitching in and doing some work, too.  If you
can't come to the meetings, at least read the papers before criticizing
the process.  If you think the people who are already doing a ton of work
don't do enough publicity, **do it yourself**.

I think it would be a **bad idea** to post all of the J3 meeting papers
in a mailing list, and maybe even a bad idea to post them in a news
group.  People **do** get pissed about wasted bandwidth.

The only way to get anything officially considered at a J3 or WG5
meeting, even if you show up in person, is to **submit a paper.**  A
search through the papers table-of-contents for 30 J3 meetings starting
with meeting 140 shows, **ta da**! ZERO papers submitted by anybody named
Giles and 539 submitted by somebody named Snyder.  This doesn't include
papers I submitted to meetings 98 - 112, which aren't online.  Nor does
it include writing the software to convert the Frame representation of
the standard to LaTeX and finishing the conversion by hand, or developing
and maintaining the LaTeX macros, or serving as project editor for
Technical Report 19767, or as International Representative from J3 to WG5
(which admittedly isn't much work).

I represent my employer's point of view to J3 and WG5.  A large part of
that representation is to advocate solutions to problems brought to me by
a substantial community of Fortran users at my place of employment.  To
that end, I submitted 112 papers (153 if you count revisions) for
meetings 167-169, a result of collecting comments from my colleagues
since about 1985 and submitting them at the precisely correct moment,
which was advertised for at least three months in this and other fora
before meeting 167.  Although J3 voted at meeting 170 not to accept
further proposals, this was probably mostly to stanch my deluge.  If a
few well-thought-out new proposals were to have been submitted before the
two-weeks-in-advance deadline for next week's J3 meeting 171, they would
almost certainly have been seriously and honestly pondered.

My colleagues sought me out because of seminars I had given in my
workplace concerning the development of Fortran.  My employer does not
support my participation in J3 in order to inform the general public or
to advocate opinions of the general public for J3 consideration.  If I
were to do so, the Defense Contract Audit Agency and the Government
Accountability Office would be all over my budget, my department's
budget, JPL's budget and NASA's budget.  I'm also not paid to comb
through the archives of alt.snivel.fortran to look for wacky ideas to
bring to J3 meetings.

Most specifically, my employer does not support my participation in J3
and WG5 meetings to keep James Giles informed, or to seek out and
advocate his opinions.

As Richard pointed out, standing in the back row and hurling turds over
the spectators at the participants isn't a great way to recruit others to
your point of view.

--
Van Snyder                    |  What fraction of Americans believe
[log in to unmask]       |  Wrestling is real and NASA is fake?
Any alleged opinions are my own and have not been approved or disapproved
by JPL, CalTech, NASA, Sean O'Keefe, George Bush, the Pope, or anybody else.