gwyn@smoke.BRL.MIL (Doug Gwyn) (04/26/89)
In article <2663@buengc.BU.EDU> bph@buengc.bu.edu (Blair P. Houghton) writes: >I'm not being chauvinistic, I just find it odd that ANSI is handling any >considerations in deference to other nations. It seems that such things >would be better served by writing an ISO spec for C. The parties involved universally agreed that it was extremely desirable that the ANSI and ISO standards for C be identical. I doubt that Rex will say so, but it seemed fairly clear that ISO WG14 did not provide as much technical expertise as was concentrated in X3J11, thus having ISO specifying their own technical details would cause great concern; there would be a greater chance of something getting horribly broken. The concern that ANSI C be acceptable also as ISO C was so great that considerable delay was introduced into the ANSI standardization process in order to address international concerns to a sufficient degree. Note that many C vendors are multinational corporations, and that "internationalization" of software is a major current concern. Therefore it was entirely appropriate for X3J11 to tackle this issue even if ISO were not involved. >I realize that it's likely that C is protected by some form of >technology-export restriction, but that raises the paradox of "why >trigraph to please foreigners if they ain't s'posed to have it?" Technology transfer and export restrictions are completely irrelevant. Trigraphs weren't introduced to please foreigners! They were specified just to ensure that there was some way of transmitting C source code to sites with minimal character set support. In particular, sites with deficient character sets are rather expected to provide some other more convenient support for programmer editing of C source code. There are too many possibilities to enumerate; we didn't want to dictate how this had to be done since it properly should depend on the specific support available at a site (fonts, stream I/O filters, etc.). >So, my next question is, when is the ISO C committee forming, and how >many boxtops from Kernighan and Ritchie's Sugar Coated C Structs do I >have to submit to become a member? ISO WG14 has been working in parallel with X3J11; in fact the Seattle meeting held earlier this month was a joint X3J11/WG14 endeavor. WG14 has national representatives; it's not very like X3J11 or IEEE P1003. DISCLAIMER: None of the above is anybody's official position except mine.