New US Rep to ISO C

[Rex Jaeschke]

> You mention that the  Danes are unimpressed with trigraphs, and that
> the UK want the unspecified specifications to be specified to be
> unspecified (and I thought I'd stopped joking...well, I have...), so, my
> question is,
> 
> Just how much input have foreign countries had in the _A_NSI spec?

Anyone from anywhere in the world can attend and participate in ANSI 
standard meetings. However, you can only vote if you are a fully paid 
voting member or registered alternate. Voting members are not 
restricted to US citizens/residents/companies as many people believe. 
Since my involment in ANSI C (late '84) the regular non-US particpants 
have been HCR from Toronto (who also supplied the Canadian rep to 
ISO), IBM (much of their C work is in Don Mills, Ontario) and ICL, the 
UK's national computer manufacturer. ICL's principal rep is also VERY 
active in X/OPEN and POSIX (there is also an ISO POSIX group now.) 
Other nationals provided input on an ad-hoc basis either by attending 
or via public comment period or e-mail. (Mark Brader comes to mind as 
does Univ. of Waterloo, who both provided many, many useful changes 
and additions.)

Once we decided to add support for western European character sets via 
locales the Europeans took quite some interest as did the Japanese who 
thought it would be nice if we could help them out as well. Hence, the 
multibyte package was invented. Much of the international interest in 
these areas was generated through P.J. Plauger's efforts. His company 
Whitesmiths (now sold to Intermetrics) has an international group of 
affiliates who, for the most part, are the  main or only C vendor "in 
town." They are very strong in Japan, France and Australia, among 
other countries. 

So his affiliates and their customers provided feedback which Plauger
collated, distilled and proposed.  In his trips to Japan he addressed
the Japan C Committee.  Also, around this time he took over
convenership of ISO C when Steve Hersee resigned (when Lattice was
aquired by SAS.) As such, Plauger played a much bigger role in
getting the international community involved.  He, along
with X3J11 and most ISO members quickly agreed that it would be best
if ANSI and ISO standards were one and the same.  That's why we
slipped back probably two years to add the locale and multibyte
stuff.

I believe that the early interest in non-English environments probably 
arose because an increasing number of US venders were selling or were 
interested to sell to Asian and European markets. Then once ISO got 
involved it made good political sense. Also, doing non-trivial 
technical standards at the ISO level is difficult and expensive. 
Meetings are conducted in English (few attendee's first language), 
voting is done by consensus not majority, and travel is often more 
expensive and much fewer people would participate.

> I'm not being chauvinistic, I just find it odd that ANSI is handling any
> considerations in deference to other nations.  It seems that such things
> would be better served by writing an ISO spec for C.  Consider also that
> the Danish trigraph complaint is mediated by their reliance on an ISO
> character set that forces them to use the dreaded things.  I realize that
> it's likely that C is protected by some form of technology-export
> restriction, but that raises the paradox of "why trigraph to please
> foreigners if they ain't s'posed to have it?"

Pretty much all national standards bodies are affiliated with ISO and 
they all agree to not form national standards that 
violate/preclude, etc., other national interests. That is, all ANSI 
standards are almost "required" to recognize the existance of 
character sets such as ISO-646. Also, from ISO's point of view, once 
ISO convenes a standards working group, any national standard effort 
already in progress is then considered being done on ISO's behalf. 
That is, for the last several years all of X3J11's efforts have really 
been on behalf of the international community. Simply stated, the US 
has been the caretaker of what was really an international standard 
even if no ISO working group existed. So the notion that the American 
National Standards Association (ANSI) is simply for the US alone, is 
quite wrong. In many cases, ANSI standards are adopted in toto by ISO 
(or other national standards groups like UK's BSI) or are only
slightly extended.

To the best of my knowledge there is no restraint on shipping language 
technology out of the country. Certainly, the Soviet Embassy can buy a 
copy of Microsoft or Turbo C and ship it out of the country. Of 
course, reverse engineering it is more difficuly but why bother. Let 
Borland maintain it and get a copy of the next release and make 1,000 
pirated copies within the USSR.  Getting s/w for VAX, IBM mainframes
etc., is not so simple.  Plus you should understand the the Soviet
Union is a member of ISO.  In fact, to the best of my knowledge, the
three official languages of ISO publications are English, French and
Russian.  Of course, the Russians do their own translation and are
glad to since they are getting all the good information.  ISO has no
political boundaries and I don't see that ANSI does either since we
allow non-US voting members.  Heck, the Soviet block is probably
monitoring this newsfeed. (As a side note, the DEC Professional, of 
which I amd C Editor, received notification from a Soviet technical 
journal that it had translated some of my articles and they sent me 
copies of the abstracts, in Russian.)

ISO meetings are more like state department summits - it's often more 
diplomacy than technical substance. And since ANSI did most of the 
technical work the US reps quite often have to go on the defensive to 
explain why they did what they did. In my three ISO meeings (Paris, 
Amsterdam and London) I have felt a hint from a few members of "here
the come the Americans riding rough shod over us trying to impose
THEIR solution on us." I have certainly never felt that way. 
Interestingly, I'm Australian-born having been in the US only 10
years.  But I guess I'm guilty by association.  Actually, I
understand the Japanese are ecstatic with our efforts - we did more
than they ever expected.

> So, my next question is, when is the ISO C committee forming, and how
> many boxtops from Kernighan and Ritchie's Sugar Coated C Structs do I
> have to submit to become a member?

ISO/TC97/SC22/WG14 otherwise known as the ISO Working Group for C, 
first met in Chicago in mid-'86 I think, with Hersee as convener. It 
has met approximately every 6 months since having joint meetings with 
ANSI X3J11 in Paris 1987 and Seattle last week.

I'm not sure how one joins or why you would want to. First a country 
nominates a primary and alternate representative who actual can vote. 
Meeting attendence is not compulsory to vote (it is in ANSI) so 
most countries that vote never attend and vote by letter ballot. The 
average ISO C meeting (without joint ANSI) is 5-8 people representing 
perhaps 5 countries. The meetings last for 1- 1 1/2 days. The mailings 
are very small and few substantive technical issues get resolved 
there. And, I believe, all significant ISO documents are included in 
ANSI C mailings. So if you are a paid-up X3J11 voting member (not 
observer) you should get all such mailings anyway.

Rex

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