🚀 go-pugleaf

To the query:

> > I'm sure the final draft is very close to the approved standard, but
> > are they identical?

Doug Gwyn responds in comp.std.c:

> They better be!

And indeed this is what everything I've seen about this question has said--
until yesterday!  Yesterday I received a copy of the Report of the Redactor,
dated February 2, 1990.  It begins:

#  1. Status
#
#  As you know, the draft has been approved as a standard.  The next step
#  is the ANSI editorial review, currently in progress as of the writing
#  of this report.  Along with the changes requested by ANSI, we were
#  given license to correct any minor technical errors, as long as they
#  were completely editorial.  This allowed us to fold in those points
#  mentioned in the ISO balloting (for DP9899) that were editorial and
#  the few editorial items I have accumulated over the past year.
#
#  By the March meeting, the Standard should be well along in the public-
#  ation process, and should be available by mid to late March.

There follows a list of 29 changes, all of which certainly seem to me to be
indisputably editorial.  Here are the first few:

#  1.6, pages 2-3, lines 33-46 [sic]
#  Alphabetize the definitions.
#
#  1.6, page 3, line 22
#  Change "Standard imposes" to "Standard explicitly imposes".  (This
#  clarifies that "unspecified behavior" only covers those places for
#  which the Standard says such, not when nothing is stated.)
#
#  2.1.2.3, page 11, line 30
#  Change "-32753" to "-32754".  (An "off by one" bug in the example.)
#
#  2.2.1, page 11, line 30
#  For clarity, even though header names are covered by the preprocessing
#  token case, change "literal," to "literal, a header name,".

Perhaps those responsible for it can see their way to posting the
entire list of changes, which runs to about 3 typeset pages.

The report continues:

#  3. ANSI editorial changes
#
#  These are some of the changes from ANSI.  Virtually all are stylistic
#  in nature.  The editors were very surprised by the *lack* of problems
#  with the draft, and complimented our work.
#
#  * The contents and the foreword had to be interchanged.
#  * The page numbers in the contents all should be right justified.
#  * The contents should have only "Contents" as its title.

and so on through a total of 20 items of this type.


This article is cross-posted to comp.lang.c, with followups directed back
to comp.std.c.

-- 
Mark Brader		     "It is impractical for the standard to attempt to
SoftQuad Inc., Toronto	      constrain the behavior of code that does not obey
utzoo!sq!msb, msb@sq.com      the constraints of the standard."  -- Doug Gwyn

All original text in this article is in the public domain.