State of ANSI C standard

[Henry Spencer]

In article <192 at harrier.ukc.ac.uk> rde at 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not buy pre-October drafts, they are badly out of date.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 at zoo.toronto.edu