It's standards update time again. By the time you read these words, the US public review of the draft C++ Standard will have ended. Committees X3J16 and WG21 have already taken one pass over the comments received prior to the July '95 meeting in Monterey. They plan to spend the entire November 95 meeting in Tokyo doing more of the same. Whether the result will be subject to another public review has yet to be determined. Know, however, that the committees are being very meticulous about responding to all comments received.The July meeting marked another major milestone. For the second time, the committees considered adding hash tables to the library. The specific proposal adds up to about 20 pages of standardese and represents a significant addition to the Standard Template Library, which the committees adopted a year earlier. David R. Musser, one of the original developers of STL, is the author. He even supplies working code, available over the Internet, after the fashion so graciously pioneered by Hewlett-Packard with the original STL.
Anyway, the interesting news is that the committees chose not to add hash tables for the second (and I hope final) time. Clearly, technical merit had nothing to do with the decision. If ever a proposal came before these committees with better credentials, I don't know about it. Far more important is the restraint exhibited by both committees. They certainly made a number of changes, not all directly related to the public comments received. But overall, the degree of change was the smallest I've seen in nearly five years of personal involvement with this effort. I think we can all start acting as if we know what the final C++ Standard might look like.
On the Standard C front, committees X3J11 and WG14 have been showing even more restraint. At the June '95 meeting in Copenhagen, many attendees made it clear that rampant invention is not in the cards for the next version of the C Standard. Anybody who wants to get changes past this group had better be prepared to do a lot of homework.
A large community of programmers around the world now depend on Standard C as a stable platform for serious development. Such conservatism will doubtless be widely welcomed. Still, I have to confess that the committees are even more conservative than I am. A little invention, from time to time, can be fun.
As a postscript, I'd like to thank all those folks who put me onto the dummy network DLL for use with HTML browsers. You can download MOZOCK.DLL from Netscape's ftp site (start at ftp.netscape.com), rename it WINSOCK.DLL, and you're in business. For the record, David Greaham got to me first, but several others also came through. Thanks to all.
P.J. Plauger
pjp@plauger.com