Re^2: New US Rep to ISO C

[Keld J|rn Simonsen]

rex at aussie.UUCP (Rex Jaeschke) writes:

>> Also it has never been treated by X3J11 as a
>> request from ISO WG14, although it has been adopted by WG14
>> and WG14 has requested X3J11 that this was a very important thing
>> to accomplish.

>Absolutely not true.  You may recall I spent quite some time with you
>in Amsterdam at the drafting committee meeting wording your proposal
>at ACE that evening so it could appear in the ISO minutes and be
>sumbitted to X3J11.  At the next X3J11 meeting it was definitely
>discussed at X3J11 and presented by Plauger on behalf of ISO.  Now I
>understand that the X3J11 minutes were "light" in this area causing
>some ISO people to believe the topic was not given a hearing (and 
>that's unfortunate.)  Let me assure you, it did.  It also addressed
>the issue again after the London ISO meeting, and again, rejected it.

Well, I remember Plauger once told me that he did not present the
proposal as an ISO WG14 proposal as the proposal was not unanomously
accepted in WG14 (4 for, 1 against), although there was a clear
majority for the paper. So it was minuted as a proposal from
"Tondering", not even Danish Standards, and I wonder why this
information was so misinterpreted on the way from Plauger to the 
secretary of the X3J11 meeting. We never saw any formal response
on this issue from this meeting.

After the London meeting, Plauger presented it as an ISO issue,
on behalf of Denmark. But it was not on behalf of only Denmark, but
on behalf of the entire WG14 group, which also had done significant
changes to the proposal.

So I think it is fair to say that it has not been presented as
a WG14 proposal. But would it had made any change, one might ask.

>> I think the reason that ISO WG14 backed out on
>> the proposal was that they were  tired after asking X3J11 several times
>> to accomodate the proposal, and ANSI resisted every time.

>Why would ISO back down if they really supported you? Actually, I 
>don't recall that Denmark has ever had any direct support for their 
>proposal from other countries. The Dutch and Finnish were not 
>particularly interested and neither was France. However, most of them 
>were not opposed to having the proposal presented to ANSI as part of 
>an ISO report.

Your memory may be failing. We got quite strong support from the 
British and there were general consensus that our proposal had more
sympathy than the proposal for multibyte support.

>> I would say if ANSI had meant to give the proposal a chance
>> they would have contacted us to solve the technical problems,

>If you are trying to sell an idea to someone and they have absolutely 
>nothing to gain from it and it will cost them extra work to implement, 
>then the burden is on you to show that it can be done, and done 
>elegantly within the spirit of the language, and just exactly what the 
>cost of doing it is. All those not interested in it will likely look 
>for holes in your proposal so they can discard it. That's life.

Yes, it is just life that ANSI X3J11 just seemed to work against
our proposal. This in spite of strong WG14 recommendations and SC22 AG
resoulutions asking ANSI to do "every effort to accomodate WG14
requests". ANSI could gain some easier, quicker and broader
international acceptance from this, and also give a more elegant solution
to some problems than the trigraphs solution gives.
There seems to be consensus that the trigraphs are not the best
invention in the standard.

My comments on international input was only meant to be about the ISO
input. I am not sure what other international input X3J11 has got.
The two weightiest inputs from WG14 not stemming from the USA
(that is the British and the Danish input) has not had much impact on
the proposed ANSI standard, IMHO.

Disclaimer: The above expressed opinions (if any) are mine only
and does not necessary represent the Danish Standards Assoc.
Also, please excuse my bad English.

Keld Simonsen