Looking for source for obtaining latest draft standard

[Mark Brader]

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 at sq.com      the constraints of the standard."  -- Doug Gwyn

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