🚀 go-pugleaf

A while back I posted a schedule for the C++ Standard. The plan was to
submit a Committee Draft (CD) to ISO and publish it for ANSI public
comments in April. That schedule was ambitious, but we hoped we could
stick to it.

For a combination of technical and administrative reasons we have now
slipped the schedule by one meeting, 4 months. For those interested
in the details, I'll give a brief summary.

According to ISO procedures, the committee votes to submit a CD for
approval by ISO member nations. Member nations vote whether to accept
the CD. A "no" vote must be accompanied by comments explaining what must
be corrected in order for the member nation to vote "yes". Those
comments must be addressed, since consensus is required for ISO to
ratify a standard.

Ordinarily, the changes needed in the CD to address comments are rather
small, and the committee submits a revised document, accompanied by an
explanation of how the comments were addressed, for advancement to
Draft International Standard (DIS) status. The DIS is voted on, and
after possibly some very minor corrections can be approved as a final
International Standard.

The key issue here is advancing from CD to DIS. If the draft is modified
in order to change "no" votes to "yes", the possibility exists that some
member nations who voted "yes" might have voted "no" on the revised
version. Consequently, if the extent of changes is too great, the ISO
secretariat will send the draft back to the committee for another round
of CD voting. That whole process takes at least 8 months, more likely a year.

The April 1995 CD was known to need a lot of work, but the C++ Committee
sent it out anyway to see if there were any serious objections. There were
not, but many changes were needed anyway, some already identified by the
committee, some due to ISO member nation and ANSI public comments.

At the end of the C++ Committee meeting last week, many unresolved issues
remained. Most of them are very small and easily handled, but if there
are 100 issues and each takes only 1 hour to resolve, that is still 100
hours of work to do. (Example: a library member function has no specified
semantics; "everyone knows" what it is supposed to do, but the words have
to be written and approved.) If we submitted the version of the draft that
comes out of the March meeting for CD, the changes we know that are
still required would be enough for ISO to send it back for another CD
round no matter what else happened. Instead of wasting that time, we
expect to finish fixing the known problems by the end of the July meeting
and submit a CD (and an ANSI public-comment version) by the end of August.
That version (with minor corrections) should be advanced to DIS status,
and become the final standard.

--
Steve Clamage, stephen.clamage@eng.sun.com
Chair, X3J16, C++ Committee
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