New US Rep to ISO C

[Rex Jaeschke]

Hi, I'm the new US representative for X3J11 to the ISO C working 
group. Although I attended three of the last four ISO C meetings (I 
missed last week's joint meeting in Seattle), I did so in an observer
capacity as P.J. Plauger was both the US rep as well as convener. 
ISO has announced a policy that they prefer the conveners to be
impartial and not also be a country's rep.  Therefore, I have stepped
in to be the new IR (International Rep) for the remainder of the
process (which most of us hope will be very short.) At this stage, the 
chances of having identical ANSI and ISO standards is very very good.
(I have also been a member of X3J11 since December 1984.)

The primary objection at this stage comes from the Danes who want
more readable trigraphs (don't we all.) However, all forms of
their proposal have been soundly rejected by ANSI for 3-4 meetings now
and last week in Seattle, even ISO voted not to back them on this
issue. The problem stems from the fact that they use the ISO-646 
character set which, as you may know, doesn't have characters such as 
[, ], {, }, #, |, and \. They also wanted an infix operator ! as an 
alternate to subscripting such that a!b == a[b]. There are technical 
problems they have not solved (for example, how to write a[]) and this 
is the main reason the proposal has been rejected. Also, their 
proposal is in addition to the existing trigraphs, NOT instead of so 
it adds more baggage.

The UK still has some doubts about the ANSI standard mostly in that 
they want all undefined behavior to be specifically stated so rather 
than making it the default. Currently, if nothing is said, it is 
unspecified or undefined.


FYI, you may have seen my recent (indirect via Friedl) posting re my 
formation of a Numerical C Extensions Group (NCEG). Interest has been 
very high and the planned meeting will go ahead May 10-11 at Cray with 
20-25 people attending. I'll post a status report within the week. The 
plan for NCEG is to build upon ANSI C in a compatible manner. At this 
stage, I think it likely that in the near future NCEG will become a 
working group within X3J11.

Finally, I must apologize for my garbage test message posting this 
last week.  I have been trying to resolve a broken link "somewhere in
usenet" for several months now and that test message was not
expected to get through. I intend future postings to have less 
garbage.

Rex

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