standards development process

[Lawrence V. Cipriani]

Henry Spencer writes:

>> I (Larry Cipriani - that's pronounced sip ree ah knee) write:
>> Future language standardizations should have more representation by
>> users, and this should be required by ANSI...

>How do you propose that they should require this?  Forbid standardization
>without adequate user representation?

Yes.

>In practice this would lead to very few standards being written.

Maybe so, then again, maybe not.  I don't think predictions like
this can be made with certainty.  If so, I can accept it.

>There is NO LAW against more users
>getting involved in ANSI standardization work!!  The problem is that
>few of them bother.

As another writer said in response, there are many perfectly good
reasons why users don't get involved, cost is a big one, lack of
time another.

>Without users who actively care and get involved,
>the situation is not going to get better; with them, the problem will cure
>itself without changes to the rules.

So far language standards have resulted in such ugly languages.
How is that any better? I'd rather not have portability than use ANSI-C.
Actually, as long as noalias was removed I would be content (but not
overjoyed) to use ANSI-C.  Consider the recent FORTRAN-8X standards,
by all accounts I've read the vendors are really screwing up FORTRAN.

>ANSI standards committees are quite
>explicitly open to anyone who wants to join.

Glad to hear it.  Part of the problem though is that people don't
even know that the standardization of something or other has started.
Maybe an alternative to requiring user participation, is that the
standardization effort should be advertised in a way that reaches
most of the users.  At least they will know about it.  I bet only
20% of the C users ever heard of ANSI-C.

>If you care so much, why weren't you in X3J11?  (I don't see your name
>in the membership list that came with the second-public-comment draft.)

AT&T was already represented, and it would be inappropriate for me to
do so independently.

-- 
Larry Cipriani, AT&T Network Systems and Ohio State University
Domain: lvc at tut.cis.ohio-state.edu
Path: ...!cbosgd!osu-cis!tut.cis.ohio-state.edu!lvc (weird but right)