rja@edison.GE.COM (rja) (05/03/89)
% To me it seems like non-US input have had a very hard time getting thru % X3J11. % Neither the British nor the Danish proposals % have got a fair treatment by X3J11, in my humble opinion. In article <12.UUL1.3#5077@aussie.UUCP>, rex@aussie.UUCP (Rex Jaeschke) writes: > There is plenty of evidence that ANSI has been responsive to non-US > input, and I don't just mean Canadian. Considering that most of ANSI > voting members are implementers and the whole area of trigraphs is > something most of them don't care a hoot about at all, give them some > credit in that they even supported the addition of the original > trigraph proposal - they didn't even have to do that. That was a > significant international goodwill gesture, make no mistake. I don't > like trigraphs but I supported their addition. While I have been involved in no way with ANSI/ISO C other than as a spectator, it seems that the original quotation above Rex's is far too sweeping a statement and certainly comes across as one person's sour grapes. Had ANSI been all that unresponsive to non-US concerns there would have been a lot of screaming about it and there hasn't been. Moreover, the support for multi-byte characters is not needed by the US and frankly will be a real pain to implement but was added to the standard to support Asian languages such as Chinese and Japanese. This clearly shows that the committee has been responsive to non-US concerns. Now I don't think that any standard or language designed by committee is perfect or that the process is perfect, but the C standards folks both of ANSI and ISO have done a good job and should be recognised as having done so. rja@edison.cho.ge.com