(j3.2006) (SC22WG5.4641) [ukfortran] Part 2 of the standard

[N.M. Maclaren]

On Mar 14 2012, David Muxworthy wrote:
>On 13 Mar 2012 John Reid wrote:
>
>> I promised at Garching to look into the conversion to Fortran 2003 of 
>> the procedures of the varying length strings module that are not 
>> included in Part 1 of the Standard. These are the I/O procedures GET, 
>> PUT and PUT_LINE and the substring manipulation procedures EXTRACT, 
>> INSERT, REMOVE, REPLACE, and INSERT.
>
> This was undertaken in the context that provision of an updated module 
> would allow withdrawal of the standard. Since then we have had the 
> results of the systematic review of the standard (11 confirm, 2 
> stabilize, 19 abstain) so formally the standard is confirmed until the 
> next review in 2016.
>
> The review also showed that a surprising number of countries (7) have 
> national standards identical to the ISO one and five answered 'yes' to: 
> "Is this International Standard used in your country without national 
> adoption or are products used in your country based on this standard?".
>
>It would seem best for WG5 to do nothing more for the time being.

I disagree that WG5 should do absolutely nothing.

The second half of the context was to consider, in the light of John's
experience, whether it was desirable to add any new intrinsics, on the
grounds that implementing them using existing facilities is  unnecessarily
error-prone or inefficient.  I feel that WG5 should still consider that
question.


Regards,
Nick Maclaren.