It means that J3 declined to add BITS to the US requests for F202Y. The specifications have been known since 2008, when it was in the draft for F2008 but was removed as it was felt the revision was too large (this happened shortly before I joined the committee, so I’m going on what I was told.)
BITS was proposed again by J3 for F2023, but with the note that an alternative would be to enhance and regularize the use of BOZ constants. WG5 chose the latter. (See Doctor Fortran in “We’re All BOZos on This Bus” - Doctor Fortran (stevelionel.com))
This time, the usefulness for BITS seemed lower, given the various bit intrinsics and enhancements to BOZ. The committee was apprehensive about adding an entirely new datatype to the language (and compilers) for something that people already do in Fortran without much difficulty. J3 voted 6-3 (2 abstained) against adding it to the US list. Theoretically, it could come back again in the next year, but I don’t think that will happen.
j3-fortran.org/doc/year/23/23-154r1.txt has the US list, all of which were accepted by WG5. Japan also submitted a proposal for “generic subroutines” - you can find it here, though it does not yet appear in the list of documents on the WG5 site (soon!).
I’m pleased to say that this morning I received word from the ISO Editorial Policy Manager that ISO will permit us to publish F2023 with our current font and font size choices; this is what I was referring to earlier. We have promised to move to ISO’s font specifications for the next revision.