Standards Update, Part 1: Overview

[Moderator, John S. Quarterman]

Newsgroups: comp.std.unix
From: uunet!BRL.MIL!gwyn

> THe big news this quarter is that the ANSI C Standard
> X3.159-1989 has been approved by the X3 Secretariat.  This
> means that the X3 people are satisfied with the technical
> merit of the standard, as well as with the procedures that
> were followed in completing it.  Once it has been formally
> reviewed by ANSI, we will have an American National standard
> for the C language.  This is good and bad.  The C Language
> standard has a few glaring flaw that make it all but
> impossible to write a truly portable application.  I am
> certain that it is possible to write a mostly portable
> application with little difficulty, but that wasn't really
> the goal of the standard.  More on this later.

This so-called information is completely misleading and certainly
did NOT come from the "X3J11 watchdog" (me).

The proposed ANS for the C programming language was approved by
letter ballot at the X3 level, but a public comment letter turned
up that had been misplaced by the X3 Secretariat, necessitating
further consideration by X3J11 and a possible additional X3 ballot
(if the correspondent feels that his issues were not adequately
addressed by X3J11 and formally submits remarks to that effect to
X3).  Until we get past this stage (which will require up to six
more weeks, depending on events), the proposed standard will not
be submitted to ANSI for ratification.

The good news is that ISO WG14 has agreed to support the proposed
ANS for C with no modifications as the ISO standard also.  (This
agreement was linked to a guarantee from X3J11 that BSI concerns
about identifying further specific instances of implementation-
dependent behavior would be addressed early in the post-standard
"interpretations" phase.)

As to "glaring flaws", I am aware of no such thing.  It is quite
easy to write a maximally portable application in Standard C.
I don't know what Shane thinks the problem is, but I reported
nothing of the kind and totally repudiate his pronouncement.

	- Douglas A. Gwyn

Volume-Number: Volume 16, Number 33