rde@ukc.ac.uk (R.D.Eager) (02/22/89)
I am a newcomer to this group and to the world of standardisation. Can someone post a short article that explains the current state of play with ANSI C, and the points at which the various things happen/have happened? Is there a final draft yet, when is the actual standard to be published, and so on.... Perhaps this would be a useful regular posting...meanwhile, thanks in advance.
henry@utzoo.uucp (Henry Spencer) (02/25/89)
In article <192@harrier.ukc.ac.uk> rde@ukc.ac.uk (R.D.Eager) writes: >I am a newcomer... Can someone >post a short article that explains the current state of play with ANSI C, and >the points at which the various things happen/have happened? Is there a final >draft yet, when is the actual standard to be published, and so on.... Unless something awful has happened, the final draft (which is very nearly identical to the October draft that we third-round commenters got) is in the process of working its way through the ANSI bureaucracy, and will, barring disasters, appear as an ANSI standard sometime in the next few months. The answer to "where can I get a copy of the draft right now?" appears to be "you can't, because nobody is selling the current drafts". Do not buy pre-October drafts, they are badly out of date. ANSI standards come up for revision periodically, nominally every five years I think. So the next time when things will start happening will be a few years down the road. If you have an urge to get something included in the next revision, the thing to do is to get it into a compiler, *now*, and start getting experience with it: such experience carries vastly more weight than paper proposals. Some people feel that the 1989 standard is likely to be definitive, with no significant changes introduced in later "revisions", because C++ will be where the action is in the future. Others disagree. -- The Earth is our mother; | Henry Spencer at U of Toronto Zoology our nine months are up. | uunet!attcan!utzoo!henry henry@zoo.toronto.edu