JTC1/SC22/WG5

An Overview of WG5 and its work


The production and maintenance of International Standards in the field of Information Technology is carried out by the International Organization for Standardization (ISO) and the International Electrotechnical Commission (IEC) through their Joint Technical Committee 1 (JTC1). Most of the work of JTC1 is, however, delegated to one of 20 Sub-Comittees (SCs) which, in turn, normally delegate the detailed work to permanent Working Groups (WGs).

SC22 is the JTC1 Sub-Committee responsible for "programming languages, their environments and system software interfaces", and carries out most of its work through nine permanent Working Groups. WG5 is the Working Group responsible for the development and maintenance of Fortran language standards.

WG5, like all other JTC1 Working Groups, consists of a Convener and one or more Project Editors, all appointed by the parent Sub-Committee (SC22 in WG5's case), together with a number of individual members who are nominated by their National Member Bodies. It is not possible to apply directly to become an individual member of a Working Group without the support of an appropriate Member Body.

WG5 currently operates a two-tier development structure whereby the Working Group itself determines the broad technical content of the Standards and other formal documents that it is working on, but delegates much of the detailed work to "development bodies" who are charged with assisting the Project Editor for a particular project to create the actual text for the document. For the previous and current Fortran Standard, the US Fortran Committee (NCITS/J3) was given the role of Primary Development Body

WG5 has also appointed NCITS/J3 to be its Primary Development Body for the next revision of Fortran, which is scheduled to be published in 2008. All WG5 working documents, as well as certain other relevant items, are available by anonymous ftp from both the official WG5 ftp server.


Comments on this page should be sent by email to the WebMaster, J.K.Reid at rl.ac.uk.

2007-01-24