Path: utzoo!utgpu!jarvis.csri.toronto.edu!mailrus!tut.cis.ohio-state.edu!cs.utexas.edu!uunet!aussie!rex
From: rex@aussie.UUCP (Rex Jaeschke)
Newsgroups: comp.std.c
Subject: Re: New US Rep to ISO C
Message-ID: <12.UUL1.3#5077@aussie.UUCP>
Date: 26 Apr 89 16:49:37 GMT
References: <4623@freja.diku.dk>
Organization: Journal of C Language Translation
Lines: 68

> 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.

> 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.

> 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.

> To me it seems like non-US input have had a very hard time getting thru
> X3J11.
> Neither the British nor the Danish proposals
> have got a fair treatment by X3J11, in my humble opinion.

There is plenty of evidence that ANSI has been responsive to non-US 
input, and I don't just mean Canadian. Considering that most of ANSI 
voting members are implementers and the whole area of trigraphs is 
something most of them don't care a hoot about at all, give them some 
credit in that they even supported the addition of the original 
trigraph proposal - they didn't even have to do that. That was a 
significant international goodwill gesture, make no mistake. I don't 
like trigraphs but I supported their addition.

Also, keep in mind that there are plenty of good US proposals that 
never made it. Tom MAcDonalds numerous proposals on complex 
arithmetic, for example. I suggest that there is a bigger need for 
that and parallel/vector support than there is for trigraphs. So, what 
we're doing via the NCEG is to work on an extensions package and 
publish it as a technical bulletin.


BTW, the views expressed in this forum re ANSO/ISO are entirely my own 
and do not necessarily replect X3J11's opinion as a group.

Rex

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