🚀 go-pugleaf

Ron Guilmette (after a brief hiatus while he changed jobs) asks:
> The biggest thing that seems to be left unspecified in
> E&S is the whole subject of standard libraries and header files. Are
> there any?
Welcome back, Ron.

The X3J16 committee has set up several working groups to address the
various aspects of the standard.  The standard will contain a library
chapter, and there is a working group addressing the library's contents.

We've had a fun time discussing the hundreds of things that might be in
that library.  James Coggins, Keith Gorlen, Doug Lea, and others have
contributed some good ideas.  We've also been reminded that there is only
so much time available, and only so much we can mandate in a standard that
all vendors claiming compliance have to implement.

So, our focus is on the classes that ``everyone agrees'' will be widely
used and generally helpful.  An initial classification is:

	1.  C++ language support (new.h, etc.)
	2.  compatibility with the C library
	3.  streams
	4.  everything else

We're trying to get some specific proposals on the first three by the
November meeting in San Francisco.  Jerry Schwarz is working on a
simplified version of iostreams as a basis for the streams discussions.

The easy part seems to be suggesting classes and sketching out the basic
functionality of them.  The hard part is working out the details.  We have
some difficult issues in getting mixed-vendor C and C++ implementations
working together, and a challenging name space management problem (both
with file names and global names) when combining C and C++ libraries.

We could use a healthy discussion here, especially from those of you who
have successfully coped with these issues.


--
Mike Vilot,  ObjectWare Inc, Nashua NH
mjv@objects.mv.com  (UUCP:  ...!decvax!zinn!objects!mjv)