[boost] C++ committee actions

From: Beman Dawes (bdawes_at_[hidden])
Date: 2003-11-03 14:38:02

The C++ committee met last week. Actions which may be of interest to 
Boosters:

* The initial version of the Library Technical Report (TR) working paper 
has been accepted; it will be refined over the next year to become the 
final TR. The plan is to finish the technical work on the TR at the Redmond 
meeting, one year from now.

* A number of mostly minor changes and fixes to the TR were voted in, based 
on early implementation experience. Library vendors seem to be implementing 
the TR with gusto, and one or two are already shipping some of the smaller 
components.

* The Iterator Facade and Adaptor, Iterator Concepts, and Fixed Size Array 
Wrapper proposals were accepted for the Library TR. All are based on Boost 
libraries.

* The Library TR is now closed; no proposals for new components will be 
accepted. The Library Working Group (LWG) will continue to accept defect 
reports from committee members until the TR is finished. (The LWG didn't 
discuss what would happen if a non-committee member submitted a defect 
report on the TR working paper, but I can't imagine it would be ignored.)

* The LWG will now begin to accept proposals for changes to the current 
standard library, for inclusion in C++xx.  (So called "impure" changes. The 
TR accepted only "pure"/"bolt-on" additions.) Details not yet worked out, 
but as usual proposals will require a fully-worded proposal in the form of 
an official committee document.

* The C (yes, C, not C++) committee decided the previous week to include 
the Special Functions from the C++ Library TR as a C library. The intent is 
to maintain as close to 100% compatibility between the two Special Function 
libraries as is possible. Certain minor changes were made to the TR library 
to facilitate compatibility.

* Both the C and C++ committees are beginning tightly coordinated work on 
new TR's dealing with "the integration of IEEE-754R decimal floating-point 
arithmetic" into the two languages. Note that IEEE-754R includes 
fixed-point and integer decimal point arithmetic as a subset of 
floating-point.

* The ECMA TG5 committee work on C++/CLI language bindings is moving 
forward on a fast track. The leadership and membership of the ECMA 
committee is dominated by long-term C++ committee members, so hopefully the 
two committee's work will be well coordinated.

* The C++ committee's Evolution Working Group continues to work on language 
changes for C++xx. That's a large effort that will take some years to 
mature, but it does seem clear that many concerns of library developers 
will be addressed.

* The committee's schedule for future meetings looks like this:

2004-03-21/26    Sydney, Australia
2004-10-17/22    Redmond, WA, USA
2005-04          Oslo, Norway
2005-09          Sydney, NS, Canada

As usual, Boost developers may attend as outside "technical experts". See 
http://www.boost.org/more/cpp_committee_meetings.html Contact me directly 
if you need more information.

--Beman