Path: utzoo!attcan!utgpu!jarvis.csri.toronto.edu!cs.utexas.edu!uwm.edu!ux1.cso.uiuc.edu!ux1.cso.uiuc.edu!uxe.cso.uiuc.edu!hirchert From: hirchert@uxe.cso.uiuc.edu Newsgroups: comp.lang.fortran Subject: Re: FIRST public review - response fina Message-ID: <50500174@uxe.cso.uiuc.edu> Date: 15 Dec 89 10:34:17 GMT References: <14164@lambda.UUCP> Lines: 114 Nf-ID: #R:lambda.UUCP:14164:uxe.cso.uiuc.edu:50500174:000:6940 Nf-From: uxe.cso.uiuc.edu!hirchert Dec 14 14:20:00 1989 jlg@lambda.UUCP writes >The X3J3 response to my first round public review comments >finally arrived. It was dated 17 November, but was not mailed >until 27 November (postmark). This is irritating for two >reasons. First, there is a 15 day limit to reply to the >committee if I think their response didn't address my comments >fully - they used 10 days of that limit waiting to mail the >letter! Second, the response contained the addresses for >obtaining the second draft of the standard as well as the >address to send second round comments - but the second public >review ENDED three days BEFORE they mailed this information. > >Fortunately, I had ample warning of the second public review >from other sources. It is clear that the committee had no >strong intent to widely advertise it (although _some_ individual >members of the committee did). > >Finally, for the most part the response did _not_ address the >issues I raised in my first round commentary. For example (as >I predicted) the committee incorrectly cited my first round >comments as support for the new POINTER facility. > >Outrage would be a mild term for my opinion of this event. >This is especially true since there was nothing particularly >individual about the responses. The committee aparently >completed and cataloged all the responses months ago. The >response to me was a generic cover letter together with an >automatically mapped set of responses to my comments - how >long could that take? 1. As a general rule, the committe tried to generate letters postdated by several days in order to insure that respondents would have their full 15 days. Apparently, something went wrong in your particular case, but this shouldn't have been the norm and most certainly was not done intentionally. 2. The text of the responses was approved last May. At that time, the committee believe that all the responses would be mailed out within a month, so it believed that an enclosure with the responses would be sufficient. Had it realized the delays that would occur, I believe it would have arranged for a separate mailing. X3J3 _did_ arrange for this comment period to be 4 months rather than the customary 2 months. X3J3 _did_ send notices of the comment period to all the publications that were notified of the first comment period. In other words, X3J3 attempted to advertise this comment period just as strongly as the first comment period. With 20/20 hindsight, we can see that in some cases, these measures were not as effective as they were the first time, but there was no reason to expect this at the time the committee was taking action. What do you think the committee should have been doing additionally to advertise the second comment period? 3. I was not on the subcommittee that drafted the response to your comments on pointers, so out of curiosity, I looked up your comment: " Pointers are needed for many applications. Although ALLOCATE and DEALLOCATE serve most of the necessary functionality, linked lists and other indirect referencing schemes are still left out. " I know I certainly would read this as supporting the idea of adding a pointer capability to Fortran. What in this is supposed to tell the committee that you wouldn't accept the particular way they chose to add this capability? (One of the purposes of the second comment period is to allow you to express objections to the specifics of the changes X3J3 has made, but why do you feel it was an inappropriate response from the committee to assume from what you said that you would welcome its decision to add pointers to the language?) 4. As you surmise, the responses were generated by pasting together responses to individual points and that many of these responses were sent to multiple people. This does _not_ mean that there was nothing individual about the responses. Every point was read to determine which response was to be sent. (Most of the subgroups writing responses has more than possible response on a given topic.) In the case of the particular subgroup I was on, I would guesstimate that about half the responses we sent out were sent to only one commentor. (That's half if you count the "generic" responses repeatedly for each commentor it was sent to. If you go by distinct responses, its more like 90% that were sent to only one commentor.) This is not to say that every response is a perfect match for the comment it responds to, but the committee certainly attempted to make them at least reasonable. As I mentioned above, the responses and the mappings of responses to commentors were approved last May. At that time, the machine readable versions of the responses and mappings (in those cases where they existed at all) were not in the hands of the person who would eventually generate the letters, but in the hands of the subgroups that generated them. In addition, none of the subgroups used the same text processing system that was eventually to be used for the letter, so conversion had to take place. The transport and conversion of all this data took substantially longer than was anticipated. At this point, copies of all the responses were generated and were distributed to the the original subgroups for proofreading. (With 20/20 hindsight, I can suggest that most commentors would have been much less upset by occasional typos or even wrong responses than they were by the delays that this engendered, but the gentleman generating the letters was concerned that if there were errors in the letters, he would be accused of sabotaging the responses, and so he wanted it to be someone else that said the letters were OK to send.) The process of shipping reems of paper all over the country to get them proofread by all five subgroups consumed another couple of months. At this point, corrections were applied, most of the letters were regenerated and proofread one more time by one additional person, and the bulk of the letters were mailed out. However, it was discovered that a few of the letters had responses either missing or incorrect. Over the next several weeks these were corrected, but this work was all done by e-mail, and it can be time consuming to try to get a 40 person committee to agree on text via e-mail. (It really is much easier to stick us all in a room and have us thrash it all out in person, but our next meeting isn't scheduled until January and you can't get enough people to change their schedules to attend a previously unscheduled meeting.) As these problems were resolved, the remaining letters were mailed out. I would judge from the date you said yours was mailed that yours must have been one of the last letters mailed, perhaps even the very last one.