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- Submitted-by: pc@hillside.co.uk (Peter Collinson)
-
- USENIX Standards Watchdog Committee
- Stephen R. Walli <stephe@usenix.org>, Report Editor
- Report on 1003.9: POSIX Fortran-77 Bindings
-
-
- E. Loren Buhle, Jr. Ph.D. <BUHLE@XRT.UPENN.EDU> reports on the April
- 15-19, 1991 meeting in Chicago, IL:
-
- POSIX.9 met to resolve objections and comments raised to the first
- ballot of the FORTRAN binding to ISO/IEC 9945-1 Standard (also known
- as POSIX.1). The ballot began in late December 1990 and ended on
- February 20, 1991. This first proposal did not obtain the necessary
- 75% acceptance of the balloters. There were 73 people in the total
- balloting group, of which 56 were eligible to vote on the standard.
- The others were parties of interest. Of the official balloting group,
- there were 23 affirmative votes, 15 negative votes, and 8
- abstentions. This 82% response was only 60% affirmative. Thus the
- first ballot failed to make the existing draft a standard.
-
- At the Chicago meeting, objections and comments from all voters (both
- official and unofficial) were reviewed and acted upon. Many valid
- points were made by the voters, resulting in changes to the draft.
- Some revisions included changing the F77 prefixes to PXF (e.g.
- F77WAIT became PXFWAIT). Joseph King's request for a ``fast exit'' was
- also added.
-
- Fast exit was added back to the draft to gain the _exit()
- functionality contained in POSIX.1. It is required to allow proper
- recovery from failed calls to any of the PXFEXEC() functions within a
- child process. It seems that recovery means that the child process
- must be able to exit without flushing buffers. The file buffers of a
- child process are copies of the parent's. The current draft says that
- on failure when PXFEXIT(), STOP and END are executed, the data in the
- buffers will be written to the file and the child will terminate. So
- when the parent writes or closes the file, the output buffers will be
- flushed and data will be duplicated (once from the failed child and
- once from the parent) in the file.
-
- Most of the objections and comments were resolved in a positive
- fashion, providing for the possibility of a successful second ballot.
- With some fast work from the 8 attendees to the POSIX.9 meeting, the
- revised draft may be recirculated in June for a 30 day period. If all
- goes well, the results of the recirculation ballot can be ready for
- resolution during the July meeting.
-
- The next meeting of the POSIX.9 working group will be July 8-12, 1991
- at the Doubletree in Santa Clara, California. The subsequent meeting
- will be October 21-25, 1991 in Parsippany, NJ.
-
-
- Volume-Number: Volume 23, Number 98
-
-