# Bullet points in the standard

**URL:** <https://fortran-lang.discourse.group/t/bullet-points-in-the-standard/4915>\
**Category:** Language enhancement\
**Created:** [December 15, 2022, 9:09pm UTC](https://fortran-lang.discourse.group/t/bullet-points-in-the-standard/4915 "2022-12-15T21:09:20Z")\
**Posts on this page:** 3\
**Page:** 1

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**Author:** ![Harper](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/h/b5ac83/32.png) [@Harper](https://fortran-lang.discourse.group/u/Harper)\
**Post date:** [December 15, 2022, 9:09pm UTC](https://fortran-lang.discourse.group/t/bullet-points-in-the-standard/4915/1 "2022-12-15T21:09:20Z")

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When writing something to send to comp.lang.fortran I found myself having to refer to f2018 A.2 para 1 bullet points 19,20. (I hope I didn’t miscount. The topic was finalization.)

Years ago I was in a meeting discussing a document and had to quickly count and say “In bullet point 6 on the unnumbered page 7 …”. That convinced me that items in any document that anyone might ever have to refer to a particular item in should be labelled 1,2,3,… or a,b,c,… etc. That includes Fortran standards.

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**Author:** ![RonShepard](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/r/a3d4f5/32.png) [@RonShepard](https://fortran-lang.discourse.group/u/RonShepard)\
**Post date:** [December 15, 2022, 10:23pm UTC](https://fortran-lang.discourse.group/t/bullet-points-in-the-standard/4915/2 "2022-12-15T22:23:19Z")

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The final draft standard has line numbers. The final document (which I do not actually have) reportedly does not have these numbers.

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**Author:** ![sblionel](https://yyz2.discourse-cdn.com/free1/user_avatar/fortran-lang.discourse.group/sblionel/32/853_2.png) [@sblionel](https://fortran-lang.discourse.group/u/sblionel)\
**Post date:** [December 16, 2022, 1:34am UTC](https://fortran-lang.discourse.group/t/bullet-points-in-the-standard/4915/3 "2022-12-16T01:34:56Z")

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This is an unfortunate effect of ISO formatting requirements. We do keep the line numbers in the “committee interpretation reference” (J3 standing document 007), but must remove them for ISO. Changing the style of bullets is more than the editor wants to handle.