Newsgroups: comp.std.c
Path: utzoo!henry
From: henry@utzoo.uucp (Henry Spencer)
Subject: Re: New US Rep to ISO C
Message-ID: <1989Apr26.022945.18698@utzoo.uucp>
Organization: U of Toronto Zoology
References: <6.UUL1.3#5077@aussie.UUCP> <2663@buengc.BU.EDU> <39709@think.UUCP>
Date: Wed, 26 Apr 89 02:29:45 GMT

In article <39709@think.UUCP> barmar@kulla.think.com.UUCP (Barry Margolin) writes:
>>Just how much input have foreign countries had in the _A_NSI spec?
>
>...  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.

X3J11 had/has a number of foreign members, and got a number of foreign
comments (mine among them) during the public-comment periods.  In fact,
if you look at the public-comment submissions, you find a remarkably high
Canadian content in particular.  Why are you USAnians so uninterested in
your own standards? :-) :-)

As to the general issue of "why?":  it is in everyone's interest for
standards to be (a) as good as possible, and (b) as widely applicable
as possible.  Item (a) makes it undesirable to reject potentially
valuable contributions because of artificial political boundaries.
Item (b) makes it positively desirable to get input from outside the
US, especially from non-English-speaking countries (Canada half
qualifies, n'est-ce pas?), to avoid the alternative of having several
incompatible standards.  (As witness the ASCII/ISO646/trigraphs mess
that has arisen out of slightly incompatible character sets.)
-- 
Mars in 1980s:  USSR, 2 tries, |     Henry Spencer at U of Toronto Zoology
2 failures; USA, 0 tries.      | uunet!attcan!utzoo!henry henry@zoo.toronto.edu