Re: F2008 draft



Joe Krahn wrote:
*** Hendrickson wrote:



Joe Krahn wrote:

It looks like the draft of F2008 is available at J3:
http://j3-fortran.org/doc/year/06 files 06-007.*

Does anyone here have an idea when the public comment period will be? Are non-member comments accepted before then?



There's also a schedule available on the same site. The
current DRAFT is a FIRST DRAFT. The schedule calls for the
final draft to go out for review around August of 2007.

Comments are always welcome (although not everyone who reads
c.l.f agrees). However, ISO and WG5 do impose some
structure on what can be done when. Roughly speaking:
1) gather requirements, 2) cut the requirements list down to
something reasonable, 3) put that stuff into the standard,
4) integrate and polish, 5) review process.

Right now, we're sort of between 3 and 4.

Comments like "feature X is broken because ..." are always welcome.

Comments like "feature Y should be enhanced" are still sort
of welcome, but you'd need to make a pretty good case for
any significant enhancement.

Comments like "hey, you forgot big feature Z..." have little
chance of being acted on.

The difference between "broke", "enhance", and "forgot" is
a judgment call :(.

At least, that's my personal opinion of the current status.


(Also mentioned in reply to Richard Maine:)
I am wondering if the above order of progress is strictly for internal development, and whether the public comment period has a chance of getting a few features that apply to an earlier stage of the development cycle. In other words, official public comments are handled only at the end, right?. In which case, they are not very useful, other than giving some ideas for the next revision.

Yes, that's probably true. A [major?] flaw in the US J3
standardization process is the lack of aggressive publicity
about how to submit proposed new features in a timely way.
ISO pretty much mandates a five year cycle, which as you
noted, means the next versions features are set in concrete
(or maybe Jello) before the last features have been
implemented. Feature proposals for F2013 need to be in the
works in the 2009 time frame, which is when F2008 is likely
to be published as an official standard. Nobody thinks
that's a good way to do things. The best J3/WG5 have come
up with is alternating between "major" and "minor" revisions
so there's sort of a 10 cycle. I'm not sure that works very
well. Can you tell, just from looking at the standards,
whether F2003 or F2008 is the "minor" revision?

Given the way committees work, it really helps if you can
convince a regular attendee to [strongly] advocate for
your new ideas. Being a good idea isn't always enough;
there are lots of good ideas, and the hard part is choosing
between competing ones. It takes a certain amount of give
and take and "Aha, that's what you meant" to get a group
to agree to something. If all that's available is a year
old written proposal, rather than a person who can answer
questions, it's much harder to accept.

Under current ISO/WG5 rules, the comment period seems to be
mainly for catching real errors of commission, rather than
errors of omission.


Alternatively, maybe it is worth trying to submit some comments earlier than the official public review period?

Yes, especially ones along the lines of "This existing
feature should be tweaked a LITTLE to make it a lot better."
Or "this description makes no sense to me."

Richard's comments, and your comments on them, are also spot on.

All in my opinion.

*** Hendrickson

Thanks,
Joe Krahn

.