Is the document marked as N2146, “Fortran 2018 Draft International Standard for Ballot”, the last freely available version of F2018 description? Had it changed significantly before the official standard was issued? And if so, are the changes documented somewhere in “open access”?
I am using https://j3-fortran.org/doc/year/18/18-007r1.pdf
J3/18-007r1 (F2018 Interpretation Document)
9th October 2018 16:46
This is an internal working document of PL22.3 and WG5.
That one I also have but it is something different, I guess.
@msz59 you might also want to look at the current 202X working draft at
https://j3-fortran.org/doc/year/21/21-007.pdf. I’m guessing it would contain
the 2018 standard plus corrections etc.
The issue here is that ISO maintains a copyright on the final standard, and issues takedown complaints if they see it publicly available. They want you to pay for a paper copy (which is just something they print from the PDF.)
Nobody on the committee uses the official document. Instead, we use the one @vmagnin linked to as our reference for interpretations and edits. The advantage of the Interpretation Document is that it has line numbers, which the official standard does not.
WG5, along with other ISO SC22 working groups, has lobbied ISO against its attempts to restrict access to all committee documents, not just the standard itself. We won a concession from ISO about this, though the ability to freely access the new ISO Documents system is still not active. For my part, I have resumed making WG5 documents available directly on wg5-fortran.org instead of linking to ISO.
For PL22.3 (J3), INCITS wants us to pass a resolution expressing the desire for open documents, and we will do that. INCITS (under which J3 operates) wants copies of all J3 documents in their repository, causing extra work for Brian, but they allow us to continue using the j3-fortran.org site as we have been for papers.
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You can also just buy the PDF, for the same price (198 CHF):
198 CHF is 218 $ today, which is probably five to ten times the price people here would accept to pay. A counterproductive price…
You may equally check to access ISO norms via other sources. Perinorm for example is one «meta distributor» for national (e.g., French, British, German, etc.) as well as for international norms (e.g., ISO). There are national partners, too. Based on own experience, some larger university / engineering school libraries may grant you access to this database as walk-in user (some contracts stipulate this clause to discern from the school’s own employees / students) if the results of your work with the database does not aim for commercial activity.
(Access to the ASTM and IEEE norms isn’t cheap, either.)
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