ACM Fortran Forum Editor

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ACM Fortran Forum Newsletter

The ACM are looking for
a new editor for Fortran Forum.

Here is a link

https://dl.acm.org/newsletter/sigplan-fortran

Here is the associated blurb from their site.

SIGPLAN FORTRAN Forum (not included in membership)
Addresses the FORTRAN language, its uses, profitability, standardization, further evolution,
and the implementation of FORTRAN processors.
Published 3 times per year.

The newsletter appears three times a year in April, August and December.

The editor produces camera ready copy for the ACM as a PDF.

There is a latex style sheet available.

If you are interested could you contact

Jeff Foster

who has recently started his term as SIGPLAN Chair.

He can be found at

https://www.sigplan.org/ContactUs/

There is a deadline of the 1st of September
to contact him.

Here is a link

https://dl.acm.org/sig/sigplan

The ACM Special Interest Group on Programming Languages (SIGPLAN)
explores programming language concepts and tools, focusing on design,
implementation, and efficient use. Its members are
programming language users, developers, implementers,
theoreticians, researchers, and educators.

ACM SIGPLAN Notices, available monthly (to be discontinued on December 2018)
in either electronic or print format, contains regular
columns and technical reports, as well as proceedings and
abstracts from several SIGPLAN conferences.
SIGPLAN sponsors four major conferences each year,
plus many additional conferences and workshops
focused on specific areas of interest.
(FORTRAN Forum, issued three times each year, is available by separate subscription.)

Ian Chivers

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ACM Fortran Forum has been discontinued. An email said

Thank you for being a subscriber to Fortran Forum. As you no doubt have noticed, the most recent issue of Fortran Forum was April 2020. Unfortunately, due to a range of circumstances, that will be the last issue for the time being, and Fortran Forum will be on hiatus indefinitely.

Although I liked the journal, I think a free online publication will reach more people if it can be launched.

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LIkewise, really a pity! Still, this might also be an opportunity, as @Beliavsky suggests. I know @rouson had some ideas in that direction, perhaps we should discuss that at the next monthly meeting.

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The free R Journal could serve as a template. Are there other online language-specific journals people know of? The Journal of Statistical Software, also free, features many R packages but is not restricted to R.

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What is the status of that community paper submitted to the discontinued ACM Fortran Forum?

The latest issue is Volume 39, Issue 1, April 2020. Although we can also see three online papers from February 2021:
https://dl.acm.org/newsletter/sigplan-fortran

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Thanks @vmagnin, good question. The paper was published as a pre-print on arXiv in September 2021. As I understand it, it’s finalized and won’t be published elsewhere.

This paper was initially invited by @rouson who (as I understand it) was meant to continue as the editor of ACM Fortran Forum. We submitted a draft to Damian in early May 2021, and a revised version in September 2021. I later learned here on Discourse that ACM Fortran Forum has been discontinued, but I don’t know any more details.

I think it’d be great to have a broader and open conversation about whether there is a need for a Fortran journal, and if yes, what would it be like and how to make it happen. @everythingfunctional and @rouson already put a lot of the groundwork here:

GitHub - fortran-lang/fortran-forum-article-template: Article template for the ACM Fortran Forum

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It seems to me the answer could be yes, if there are people who have the time to make it happen. @rouson and @everythingfunctional put a lot of effort into this, but even that was not enough, it seems it requires even more effort. So from a practical perspective, we might not have anybody right now who has the time this effort requires. However, we might be able to organize ourselves to pull something like this off. For example we are able to pull off the Fortran newsletter every month.

One issue is that Fortran Forum is not open access, so you need to access it via some institution that has subscription. I think that quite severely limits the audience, because even if you happen to work for a school or a lab that has subscription, often times you might be at home or traveling and it’s not easy to access it. And many people do not work for such an institution.

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(I’m reasonably certain that) that template repository for future papers does not actually belong exclusively to ACM Fortran Forum (which it seems has now been discontinued anyway). @rouson and I at one point discussed the possibility of creating an open access journal for Fortran instead of continuing the ACM publication, but neither of us has had the time to actually pursue it. If anyone would be willing to take on the effort I’d be happy to at least show them how that template is intended to work and make any modifications to it so that it doesn’t say ACM Fortran Forum anywhere.

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Just a few thoughts:

  • How much work would be involved? I have honestly no idea what goes into such an online journal. That makes it a leap into the dark for me and I guess I am not the only one. I really liked the overviews that Fortran Forum provided.
  • I guess a lot depends on the frequency and if you would include a peer review process, like @rouson suggested when we talked about the idea.
  • Could we somehow include an archive of the articles that appeared in the ACM Fortran Forum? I guess that ACM keeps them available too as part of their digital library, but that is not open access ;).
    *Such a journal could also be used to report on activities from the standards committee, just as FF did, and on activities from other groups, the generics working group for isntance.