a665@mindlink.UUCP (Anthon Pang) (01/15/91)
ets@wrkgrp.COM (Edward T Spire) writes: > > News from the ANS X3J[008qXX Standards Committee > [...] > BTW, we can't see having a draft done before 1982, and getting approval > before 1983. But that does look possible, given the above ground rules. > Is this a typo or a repost? Or are we really 7 years behind in getting a first draft done?
ets@wrkgrp.COM (Edward T Spire) (01/16/91)
News from the ANS X3J[008qXX Standards Committee The first meeting was held in Washington DC on January 8-9. In attendance were most REXX developers and distributors, as well as several user ogranizations. We spent about 1/2 day learning a bit about the ANS X3 bureaucracy, 1/2 day figuring out how we could get anything done in a reasonable time frame therein, and established some goals for the first standard. We also began general discussions of some of the issues involved, and made a few very preliminary work assignments. I suppose the most important point was our feeling on the scope of the first standard. Almost all of us felt that significant "improvements" to the language were not part of our initial goal. We expect that the first standard will pretty much simply codify what Mike Cowlishaw has wrought up to now. So we expect to write a "standard" based on Mike's definition of the language, and then tighten it up a bit and fill in any "holes" that make for ambiguities that exist (some do, as can be seen in a few minor variations between how the various implementations handle certain specific complex cases.) We also plan to look at things in the language that relate to other platforms and operating environments than those originally in use, that are currently causing difficulties. Such things come up more for the Amiga and Unix implementations, I suppose, although what we do about them may affect the other implementations just a bit. For example, we were thinking about functions like chdir(), which many implementations have, even though they are not part of the "language". We might make them part of the language standard, and demand that the functions exist (and fail in a well-defined manner) on platforms that have no directory structure. Another example of environment-specific concerns is the handling of tab as white space in syntactical analysis and the operation of the parse instruction... We expect to think about extensions too. We hope to publish our thoughts on what kind of things might show up as extensions in a later standard. If one or two of the ideas we consider seem to be of critical importance to the community in general, they may find their way into the first standard. We are in touch with groups like Share on these points, so we certainly won't be making up any wierd extensions on our own. Mike Cowlishaw is on the committee, and we are all glad to have his views on why the current language definition is the way it is. We all promise we'll do our best not to "mess up" the language in any way. I hope to keep the user community informed of our thoughts through this means, so we can have all relevent input, and there won't be any surprises when we're all done. The next meeting is scheduled for Asilomar, May 6-7 (right before the next SLAC REXX symposium, to be held there as well). We hope to have approved officers (red tape...), a draft standard table of contents (based loosely on the recent C standard), and the beginning of syntax diagrams for the language. We expect to use email extensively for our discussions, and have set up a private broadcaster to help with this. I'm sure that any comments directed to myself or any other member of the committee will reach all of us, and any comments are welcome and desired. BTW, we can't see having a draft done before 1982, and getting approval before 1983. But that does look possible, given the above ground rules. ========================================================================== Ed Spire email: ets@wrkgrp.com (on uunet) The Workstation Group voice: 800-228-0255 6300 River Road, Suite 700 or 708-696-4800 Rosemont, Illinois 60018 fax: 708-696-2277