(j3.2006) Straw ballot votes

[Gary Klimowicz]

Hello Steve,

Here my votes:

Do you approve making the technical change to add a requirement that the variable specified for STAT= in MOVE_ALLOC
and the ATOMIC_xxx intrinsics have a minimum decimal range of 4? See J3 paper 17-219 for details.
Yes

Do you approve disallowing a coarray or coindexed variable on the left side of an intrinsic assignment statement if it is an
unallocated allocatable variable? This is an incompatibility with Fortran 2008 which did not disallow this. See J3 paper 17-228 for details. Comment: This closes loopholes that were never intended to work anyway.
Yes

Do you approve making the technical change to disallow coarrays of TEAM_TYPE? See J3 papers 17-202r1 and 17-250r2 for details.
Yes

Do you approve, after making changes passed at J3 meeting 214, creating a Draft International Standard (DIS) and sending it for ballot?  This would meet the current development schedule.
Yes

Do you approve changing the informal name of the in-development Fortran standard from "Fortran 2015" to "Fortran 2018"?
Yes. Fortran is in a fight for mindshare and users against C++ and other alternatives for high performance computing. The typical young HPC developer?s view of Fortran as a dying language of the past is reinforced by the perception that it takes 5+ years for implementers to add support for a given version of the standard with highly-desired new features.  This perception is partially artificially created, and certainly exacerbated, when a version of the standard is named after a year that is 3 years prior to the finalization of that version.  Our work is measured against languages that name their standards with the year they are published. I believe we suffer unnecessarily by comparison.  While this is nothing more than a programming language marketing and positioning issue, we at NVIDIA and PGI think it?s very important and the committee would be unwise to ignore it.  Seldom do we have such easy decisions that have the potential make such a big difference in the perception and ongoing success of the Fortran language.

Changing the name of the standard to "2018" will cause some temporary confusion, but leaving the name as "2015" runs the risk that more people will turn away from Fortran permanently.

-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------
This email message is for the sole use of the intended recipient(s) and may contain
confidential information.  Any unauthorized review, use, disclosure or distribution
is prohibited.  If you are not the intended recipient, please contact the sender by
reply email and destroy all copies of the original message.
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://mailman.j3-fortran.org/pipermail/j3/attachments/20171030/56efa856/attachment-0001.html>