pc@hillside.co.uk (Peter Collinson) (06/06/91)
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