I'm back on the subject of standards again. (See the Editor's Forum, CUJ November 1992 and January 1993.) The most interesting news is that the ISO C standards committee WG14 voted out an amendment to the C language at its last meeting, back in December. It includes a (much modified) set of alternate spellings for all those operators and punctuators that use funny characters not widely available. It also includes lots more functions for manipulating the large character sets used by the Japanese, Chinese, and several other cultures.Future editions of my column, "Standard C," will discuss the technical details in greater depth. They are of interest mostly to people who write for international markets. My experience is that more and more of you will fall into that category as time goes by. On the subject of time, however, don't feel too rushed. The amendment still faces at least two votes within ISO SC22, the parent committee. Don't look for an official standard for many months to come.
The next most interesting news is that SC22 has finally given us clear guidance for both interpreting and patching the C Standard. WG14 has begun by picking up all the ANSI Requests for Interpretation. They should finally see the light of day as an ISO Record of Response. WG14 will continue to ask X3J11, the original authors of the ANSI C Standard, for assistance in forming responses. But we can now use a more streamlined ISO channel for closing the loop.
My job as Convenor of WG14 effectively makes me caretaker for the Standard C programming language. Besides convening WG14 meetings on a regular basis, I am now the keeper of what SC22 calls the Defect Report Log — the formal requests for interpretation of (or correction to) the C Standard. By an administrative quirk, I can also personally expedite the filing of Defect Reports.
Please don't take this admission as an invitation to send in all your random queries about the C Standard. I reserve the right not to sponsor any Defect Report that I choose. But if your organization needs a technical clarification, sending the request straight to me just might lob a month or two off of going through ANSI or another ISO member body.
I did make good on my threat to resign all my posts within ANSI. That saves me a lot of money and a bit of time attending meetings. It costs me the right to vote on how C and C++ evolve, but what the heck. I hope to use the extra money and time to get more book writing done in 1993. That assumes, of course, that you don't all deluge me with interpretation requests.
P.J. Plauger
pjp@plauger.com