standards development process

[Barry Margolin]

In article <10314 at tut.cis.ohio-state.edu> lvc at tut.cis.ohio-state.edu (Lawrence V. Cipriani) writes:
>As another writer said in response, there are many perfectly good
>reasons why users don't get involved, cost is a big one, lack of
>time another.

Why is this?  Why are companies that produce compilers richer than
companies that write everything else?  If a company has a vested
interest in producing portable C programs then it should be worth
$100/year and some person-time to make sure that its needs are
represented in the standard.  If by "users" you mean individuals,
rather than companies, I think this effect is by design; one purpose
of the membership fee is to prevent complete randoms from joining,
making sure that committees are made up of those whose livelihood is
significantly impacted by the lack of a standard (in the case of
languages, this generally includes vendors of compilers and vendors of
programs written in that language).

>>ANSI standards committees are quite
>>explicitly open to anyone who wants to join.
>
>Glad to hear it.  Part of the problem though is that people don't
>even know that the standardization of something or other has started.
>Maybe an alternative to requiring user participation, is that the
>standardization effort should be advertised in a way that reaches
>most of the users.  At least they will know about it.  

Communications of the ACM has a regular column that reports on
computer-related standards activities.  I believe that IEEE Computer
and ComputerWorld may also have similar columns.  What more can be
done, a mass mailing?

>							I bet only
>20% of the C users ever heard of ANSI-C.

I'm sure that most books on C in the last few years mention the
standardization.  For example, Harbison & Steele mentions it
throughout the book.  There have been articles in magazines such as
Byte and Computer Languages.  Unfortunately, personal phone calls to
everyone who has purchased Turbo-C are not feasible :-)

Barry Margolin
Thinking Machines Corp.

barmar at think.com
uunet!think!barmar