The main item of business was to consider the ballot comments on the draft revision ( N1723 ) of Fortran 2003 and decide on any technical changes to be made. WG5's responses to the comments are contained in N1760. The main changes were to add locks to the coarray feature, see PL22.3 paper 08-256r2. and to alter the treatment of volatile coarrays, see PL22.3 paper 08-297r1. A revised summary of the coarray feature is in preparation (to be N1762).

Concern was expressed over the schedule ( N1693 ) and it was decided to review this at the next meeting (May 2009).

There was not enough time to consider fully the technical content of the TR on Further Interoperability of Fortran with C, so a letter ballot of WG5 is being held, see N1763 and N1761.

The main item of business was to review the current working draft for the next revision of Part 1 of the Fortran Standard, see N1705.pdf N1705.ps.gz

Following the abstentions at the London 2007 meeting by Canada, Japan, and UK on the content of the draft revisions, the positions of these countries was considered in the hope of reaching consensus.

The delegation of Canada, see N1712, wished to reduce the size of the revision by limiting the co-rank of co-arrays to one and removing all parallel input/output. Handling co-arrays of co-rank greater than one was seen as useful in applications while not being a big implementation burden, so this was not accepted. On the other hand, parallel input/output was seen as untested and worthy of further study.

The delegation of UK, see N1710, suggested that co-arrays be moved to Technical Report and the delegation of Japan, see N1706 suggested that co-arrays be moved to another part of the standard. Neither of these ideas was acceptable to many delegates because it reduces the emphasis on co-arrays.

On the third day of the meeting, a compromise proposed by USA was found acceptable to most delegates. It is to separate parallel programming features into a "core" set that remain in Fortram 2008 while the following features are moved into a separate Technical Report on "Enhanced Parallel Computing Facilities".

1. The collective intrinsic subroutines.
2. Teams and features that require teams.
3. The NOTIFY and QUERY statements.
4. File connected on more than one image, except for the files preconnected to the units specified by OUTPUT_UNIT and ERROR_UNIT.

The technical changes needed to implement this were agreed. The draft will be available for public comment from mid March to the end of August.

The editor suggested that hyphens be removed from the words "co-array", "co-rank", etc. to conform better with the style of the document. It was pointed out that mathematics already contains similar words, e.g. "cosine" and "cotangent". The change was accepted.

The meeting made good progress on interpretations. One set of interpretations is already being voted by WG5. Another set has just completed its PL22.3 ballot and will be voted by WG5 soon. A new corrigendum will be sent to ISO no later than June.