New US Rep to ISO C

[Barry Margolin]

In article <2663 at buengc.BU.EDU> bph at buengc.bu.edu (Blair P. Houghton) writes:
>Just how much input have foreign countries had in the _A_NSI spec?

I'm not in X3J11, but I am in X3J13 (the Common Lisp standardization
committee), and international issues come up there, too.  In general,
there doesn't seem to be a restriction against foreign members of ANSI
committees.  We have several Japanese and European members in X3J13.

>I'm not being chauvinistic, I just find it odd that ANSI is handling any
>considerations in deference to other nations.

There are several reasons why international issues impact US
standards.  First of all, the ANSI committee provides the US
representation to the corresponding ISO working group.  Second, when
developing an ISO standard, the best chance of success is provided if
you simply propose an existing national standard; in this case, X3J11
would simply propose the ANSI C standard, which already has provisions
for national character sets (we're making similar changes to Common
Lisp for the same reason).  Third, ANSI (or maybe just X3) frequently
will not approve a standard that is known to conflict with an ISO
standard; many of the members are multinational corporations, and it
would be expensive for them to have to produce different versions of
their products for domestic and foreign use.  They can generally be
convinced when national security is used as the excuse (e.g. the
prohibition against exporting Unix crypt()), but they'll balk at
childish not-invented-here syndrome.  Finally, standardizing products
that can be marketed outside the US helps US competitiveness in the
world market.

Barry Margolin
Thinking Machines Corp.

barmar at think.com
{uunet,harvard}!think!barmar