mjv@objects.mv.com (Michael J. Vilot) (11/22/90)
Tom Horsley asked about the status of these ``experimental'' aspects of the language. Ron Guilmette posted a somewhat cryptic reply, which I'd like to expand a little. At the July meeting of X3J16 in Seattle, the committee decided to adopt the proposed template mechanism into the working draft for the standard. At last week's meeting in San Francisco, the committee decided to adopt the proposed exception handling mechanism. In each cases, ``the proposal'' was the text of the appropriate chapter in ``The Annotated Reference Manual'' by Ellis and Stroustrup (net jargon: either ARM or E&S). To the extent that such action ``defines'' the C++ language, these decisions make the features part of the language. At the very least, they indicate that the syntax and semantics as described in the book are likely to end up in the final standard -- vendors of C++ implementations can begin work on these feature with some confidence that the definitions will remain (relatively ;-) stable. Of course, we'll need to provide feedback on these definitions, based on our experience implementing and using the features. The sooner these features show up in C++ implementations, the more time the committee will have to incorporate the feedback. -- Mike Vilot, ObjectWare Inc, Nashua NH mjv@objects.mv.com (UUCP: ...!decvax!zinn!objects!mjv)