The Shape of Code

Last Tuesday I was at the British Standards Institute for a meeting of IST/5, the programming languages committee.

My suggestion that the Cobol 2014 standard may be the last revision of that language appears to be coming true; there has been a steep decline in membership of the US Cobol committee (this is where all the work is done, with the rest of the world joining this committee or rubber stamping what comes out of it), and nobody has expressed interest in being involved in new work items.

Fortran appears to be going strong, with a revised standard planned for 2017.

In October C++ are rectifying the fact that they have not meet in Hawaii for three years. In fairness I ought to point out that the Fortran committee, when hosted by INCITS/PL22.3, regularly hold meetings in Las Vegas (I’m told its because the hotel rooms are cheap; Nevada is where US underground atom bomb tests were located and lots of super-computers executing programs written in Fortran were involved, or perhaps readers can think of an alternative explanation that does not invoke secret government organizations).

I found out that PL/1 is still an ISO Standard.

Work on the C and Ada standards continues.

Prolog has a new convenor, Ulrich Neumerkel. There was a meeting during April in Dresden, Germany but no minutes have been published. Did anybody attend?

ISO/IEC 23360-1:2006, the ISO version of the Linux Base Standard is almost 10 years behind the specification published by the organization who actually does the work. Some voices have expressed an interest in updating the ISO document. What does ISO’s version of the Linux Standard Base have to do with the committee responsible for programming languages?

Well, a long time ago in a galaxy far away, or the late 1980s in London, some people decided to set up a committee that specified O/S related library functions callable from C programs. SC22, programming languages, was the existing ISO committee having the closest fit with this new working group; initially it produced a specification that went under the name POSIX. Jump forward 15 years and Linux was the big POSIX success story (ok, the Linux people might see things differently) and dare I suggest that one of the motivations for creating ISO/IEC 23360-1:2006 might have been to bask in the reflected success of Linux. I understand the motivation of people involved in the standard’s process for wanting to published an update that reflects the current state of play (seriously out of date standards degrade the brand), but I don’t see why the Linux Foundation would be interested in going through the hassle of making this happen (unless they are having a mid-life crisis and are seeking approval of their work from an authority figure). Watch this blog for a 2016 status update.