🚀 go-pugleaf

%  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.

In article <12.UUL1.3#5077@aussie.UUCP>, rex@aussie.UUCP (Rex Jaeschke) writes:
> 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.
 
While I have been involved in no way with ANSI/ISO C other than as a
spectator, it seems that the original quotation above Rex's is far too
sweeping a statement and certainly comes across as one person's sour
grapes.  Had ANSI been all that unresponsive to non-US concerns there
would have been a lot of screaming about it and there hasn't been.

Moreover, the support for multi-byte characters is not needed by the
US and frankly will be a real pain to implement but was added to the
standard to support Asian languages such as Chinese and Japanese.
This clearly shows that the committee has been responsive to non-US
concerns.

Now I don't think that any standard or language designed by committee
is perfect or that the process is perfect, but the C standards folks
both of ANSI and ISO have done a good job and should be recognised
as having done so.

rja@edison.cho.ge.com