C-ISAM as formal standard? If so, by whom?

[Moderator, John S. Quarterman]

From: uunet!mitel!sce!cognos!glee (Godfrey Lee)

In article <357 at longway.TIC.COM> Dominic Dunlop <uunet!sphinx.co.uk!domo> writes:
>Does anybody out there know if the venerable C-ISAM interface has been
>adopted, or is about to be adopted, by any public standards body (ANSI,
>ISO, IEEE, UL... you name it)
> [....]  As far
>as I'm aware, the current state of play is that C-ISAM has beached in the
>X/Open Portability Guide, but no public body has tried to pick it up from
>there.

X/Open has not beached C-ISAM, but has instead firmed up the specs. Quoted from
the X/Open Portability Guide Issue 3 which I received about a month ago:

    The X/Open ISAM definition is a major subset of the specification of C-ISAM
    product, version 2.10, published by Informix Software Inc. of Menlo Park,
    California.

In Issues 1 & 2, certain implementation specific features were dropped, for
example, audit trail and decimal datatypes.

In Issue 3, more detailed descriptions of locking and error handling were
provided, as well as minor changes to accomodate ANSI COBOL standards.

As far as I know, Informix has said that they will conform with X/Open, and
other vendors are coming out with compatible versions of X/Open ISAM.
-- 
Godfrey Lee                                            P.O. Box 9707
Cognos Incorporated                                    3755 Riverside Dr.
VOICE:  (613) 738-1338 x3802   FAX: (613) 738-0002     Ottawa, Ontario
UUCP: uunet!mitel!sce!cognos!glee                      CANADA  K1G 3Z4

Volume-Number: Volume 16, Number 54