(j3.2006) This doesn't seem to be about the minutes of the meeting, actually.

[Malcolm Cohen]

Van Snyder wrote:
> On Tue, 2010-02-23 at 13:55 -0800, Bill Long wrote:
>
>> As Malcolm has already noted, past predictions of a "maintenance only"
>> update of Fortran have always turned out to be substance-free...
>
> Malcolm made that remark in the context of Fortran 95.  I think that's
> the only revision that was intended to be "maintenance only."  After
> Fortran 90, however, there were two TR's and three corrigenda, so the
> development agenda for Fortran 95 was at least to incorporate them.

That is inaccurate; there were no TRs.  The very idea of doing TRs was first 
mooted in the 1995 WG5 meeting.

> I don't know whether the initial plan was to do only that,

There was resistance to doing F95 at all, partly because some people didn't 
think it would get limited to bug fixes only.  In the event, it was agreed to 
also allow some "really important" stuff: this was partly because of HPF (which 
was mostly directives but they had a few extensions as well).

The initial plan didn't survive the following meeting though, and many other 
things got added.

> My sponsors have made it clear, however, that they have an agenda that
> goes beyond finishing what was pushed off the original 2008 work plan in
> order to meet the schedule.  If the WG5 edict becomes "no new features
> other than currently existing TR's until 2018,"

The WG5 edict was "we won't even think about this until mid-2012".

Earlier written:
> My colleagues view the failure to undertake any substantive development
> of Fortran until 1990 as the major reason for the bad odor Fortran has
> in computer science departments.

My experience is that Fortran was disparaged by CS departments in 1979 (by a 
department that knew what was in F77, too).  I find it hard to believe it was 
because they knew how long it would take for Fortran 90 to appear.

Cheers,
-- 
................................Malcolm Cohen, Nihon NAG, Tokyo.