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2021 in the programming language standards’ world
Last Tuesday I was on a Webex call (the British Standards Institute’s use of Webex for conference calls predates COVID 19) for a meeting of IST/5, the committee responsible for programming language standards in the UK.
There have been two developments whose effect, I think, will be to hasten the decline of the relevance of ISO standards in the programming language world (to the point that they are ignored by compiler vendors).
- People have been talking about switching to online meetings for years, and every now and again someone has dialed-in to the conference call phone system provided by conference organizers. COVID has made online meetings the norm (language working groups have replaced face-to-face meetings with online meetings). People are looking forward to having face-to-face meetings again, but there is talk of online attendance playing a much larger role in the future.
The cost of attending a meeting in person is the perennial reason given for people not playing an active role in language standards (and I imagine other standards). Online attendance significantly reduces the cost, and an increase in the number of people ‘attending’ meetings is to be expected if committees agree to significant online attendance.
While many people think that making it possible for more people to be involved, by reducing the cost, is a good idea, I think it is a bad idea. The rationale for the creation of standards is economic; customer costs are reduced by reducing
diversityincompatibilities across the same kind of product., e.g., all standard conforming compilers are consistent in their handling of the same construct (undefined behavior may be consistently different). When attending meetings is costly, those with a significant economic interest tend to form the bulk of those attending meetings. Every now and again somebody turns up for a drive-by-shooting, i.e., they turn up for a day to present a paper on their pet issue and are never seen again.Lowering the barrier to entry (i.e., cost) is going to increase the number of drive-by shootings. The cost of this spray of pet-issue papers falls on the regular attendees, who will have to spend time dealing with enthusiastic, single issue, newbies,
- The International Organization for Standardization (ISO is the abbreviation of the French title) has embraced the use of inclusive terminology. The ISO directives specifying the Principles and rules for the structure and drafting of ISO and IEC documents, have been updated by the addition of a new clause: 8.6 Inclusive terminology, which says:
“Whenever possible, inclusive terminology shall be used to describe technical capabilities and relationships. Insensitive, archaic and non-inclusive terms shall be avoided. For the purposes of this principle, “inclusive terminology” means terminology perceived or likely to be perceived as welcoming by everyone, regardless of their sex, gender, race, colour, religion, etc.
New documents shall be developed using inclusive terminology. As feasible, existing and legacy documents shall be updated to identify and replace non-inclusive terms with alternatives that are more descriptive and tailored to the technical capability or relationship.”
The US Standards body, has released the document INCITS inclusive terminology guidelines. Section 5 covers identifying negative terms, and Section 6 deals with “Migration from terms with negative connotations”. Annex A provides examples of terms with negative connotations, preceded by text in bright red “CONTENT WARNING: The following list contains material that may be harmful or
traumatizing to some audiences.”“Error” sounds like a very negative word to me, but it’s not in the annex. One of the words listed in the annex is “dummy”. One member pointed out that ‘dummy’ appears 794 times in the current Fortran standard, (586 times in ‘dummy argument’).
Replacing words with negative connotations leads to frustration and distorted perceptions of what is being communicated.
I think there will be zero real world impact from the use of inclusive terminology in ISO standards, for the simple reason that terminology in ISO standards usually has zero real world impact (based on my experience of the use of terminology in ISO language standards). But the use of inclusive terminology does provide a new opportunity for virtue signalling by members of standards’ committees.
While use of inclusive terminology in ISO standards is unlikely to have any real world impact, the need to deal with suggested changes of terminology, and new terminology, will consume committee time. Most committee members tend to a rather pragmatic, but it only takes one or two people to keep a discussion going and going.
Over time, compiler vendors are going to become disenchanted with the increased workload, and the endless discussions relating to pet-issues and inclusive terminology. Given that there are so few industrial strength compilers for any language, the world no longer needs formally agreed language standards; the behavior that implementations have to support is controlled by the huge volume of existing code. Eventually, compiler vendors will sever the cord to the ISO standards process, and outside the SC22 bubble nobody will notice.
2018 in the programming language standards’ world
I am sitting in the room, at the British Standards Institution, where today’s meeting of IST/5, the committee responsible for programming languages, has just adjourned (it’s close to where I have to be in a few hours).
BSI have downsized us, they no longer provide a committee secretary to take minutes and provide a point of contact. Somebody from a service pool responds (or not) to emails. I did not blink first to our chair’s request for somebody to take the minutes 🙂
What interesting things came up?
It transpires that reports of the death of Cobol standards work may be premature. There are a few people working on ‘new’ features, e.g., support for JSON. This work is happening at the ISO level, rather than the national level in the US (where the real work on the Cobol standard used to be done, before being handed on to the ISO). Is this just a couple of people pushing a few pet ideas or will it turn into something more substantial? We will have to wait and see.
The Unicode consortium (a vendor consortium) are continuing to propose new pile of poo emoji and WG20 (an ISO committee) were doing what they can to stay sane.
Work on the Prolog standard, now seems to be concentrated in Austria. Prolog was the language to be associated with, if you were on the 1980s AI bandwagon (and the Japanese were going to take over the world unless we did something about it, e.g., spend money); this time around, it’s machine learning. With one dominant open source implementation and one commercial vendor (cannot think of any others), standards work is a relic of past glories.
In pre-internet times there was an incentive to kill off committees that were past their sell-by date; it cost money to send out mailings and document storage occupied shelf space. In an electronic world there is no incentive to spend time killing off such committees, might as well wait until those involved retire or die.
WG23 (programming language vulnerabilities) reported lots of interest in their work from people involved in the C++ standard, and for some reason the C++ committee people in the room started glancing at me. I was a good boy, and did not mention bored consultants.
It looks like ISO/IEC 23360-1:2006, the ISO version of the Linux Base Standard is going to be updated to reflect LBS 5.0; something that was not certain few years ago.
ISO/IEC JTC 1/SC 42 Artificial intelligence
What has been preventing Artificial Intelligence being a success? Yes, you guessed it, until now ISO has not had an SC (Standards’ Committee) dealing with AI. Well, the votes are in and JTC 1/SC 42 Artificial intelligence is go.
Countries pay ISO to be members of an SC and the tax payers of: Austria, Canada, Finland, Germany, Ireland, Switzerland and United States have the pleasure of being founding member countries of SC42.
What standards/technical-reports are those attending SC42 meetings going to working on?
The two document titles I have seen so far are: “Artificial Intelligence Concepts and Terminology” and “Framework for Artificial Intelligence (AI) Systems Using Machine Learning (ML)”.
I hope the terminology document arrives in plenty of time, before the machines take over. The ISO Standard for Year 2000 terminology arrived in December 1999 (there was a flurry of emails desperately trying to row-back on this document).
Want to join up? Wael William Diab is the chairperson.
2017 in the programming language standards’ world
Yesterday I was at the British Standards Institution for a meeting of IST/5, the committee responsible for programming languages.
The amount of management control over those wanting to get to the meeting room, from outside the building, has increased. There is now a sensor activated sliding door between the car-park and side-walk from the rear of the building to the front, and there are now two receptions; the ground floor reception gets visitors a pass to the first floor, where a pass to the fifth floor is obtained from another reception (I was totally confused by being told to go to the first floor, which housed the canteen last time I was there, and still does, the second reception is perched just inside the automatic barriers to the canteen {these barriers are also new; the food is reasonable, but not free}).
Visitors are supposed to show proof that they are attending a meeting, such as a meeting calling notice or an agenda. I have always managed to look sufficiently important/knowledgeable/harmless to get in without showing any such documents. I was asked to show them this time, perhaps my image is slipping, but my obvious bafflement at the new setup rescued me.
Why does BSI do this? My theory is that it’s all about image, BSI is the UK’s standard setting body and as such has to be seen to follow these standards. There is probably some security standard for rules to follow to prevent people sneaking into buildings. It could be argued that the name British Standards is enough to put anybody off wanting to enter the building in the first place, but this does not sound like a good rationale for BSI to give. Instead, we have lots of sliding doors/gates, multiple receptions (I suspect this has more to do with a building management cat fight over reception costs), lifts with no buttons ‘inside’ for selecting floors, and proof of reasons to be in the building.
There are also new chairs in the open spaces. The chairs have very high backs and side-baffles that surround the head area, excellent for having secret conversations and in-tune with all the security. These open areas are an image of what people in the 1970s thought the future would look like (BSI is a traditional organization after all).
So what happened in the meeting?
Cobol standard’s work becomes even more dead. PL22.4, the US Cobol group is no more (there were insufficient people willing to pay membership fees, so the group was closed down).
People are continuing to work on Fortran (still the language of choice for supercomputer Apps), Ada (some new people have started attending meetings and support for @ is still being fought over), C, Internationalization (all about character sets these days). Unprompted somebody pointed out that the UK C++ panel seemed to be attracting lots of people from the financial industry (I was very professional and did not relay my theory that it’s all about bored consultants wanting an outlet for their creative urges).
SC22, the ISO committee responsible for programming languages, is meeting at BSI next month, and our chairman asked if any of us planned to attend. The chair’s response, to my request to sell the meeting to us, was that his vocabulary was not up to the task; a two-day management meeting (no technical discussions permitted at this level) on programming languages is that exciting (and they are setting up a special reception so that visitors don’t have to go to the first floor to get a pass to attend a meeting on the ground floor).
Reality in the world of programming language standards
I see a lot of steam being vented about the standards’ process as applied to programming languages and software related topics. Knowing something about how the process works might help people live calmer lives, at least once they have calmed down after reading this article. What I have to say applies to programming language standards because these are what I have been involved with, as a member and convener of various UK and international committtees, for 25+ years.
- ISO and your national standards’ body don’t care about the standard you are talking about.
These organizations are monopolies who are required to demonstrate that documented procedures are followed by all concerned. Can you think of any organizational structure that would create less incentives for those on the inside to listen to those on the outside?
Yes, these organizations do sell standards but the sales model is all about the long tail and no peak, to speak of, of best sellers. The real business model for running a standards’ organization is to either charge members a fee (your country pays membership dues for each Standards Committee it wants a say in; if your country has not paid to be a member of ISO JTC 1/SC22 you have no say in programming language standards. ANSI in the US charges people for the right to volunteer their time to attend meetings to work on a standard) and/or rely on government subsidy.
Not being cared about is actually a luxury that people who work in programming language standards should aspire to. The bureaucrats who work in standards hate us; here in the UK there has been at least one attempt to kill off work on programming language standards and I have heard of similar experiences in other countries. The problem is that the standards we produce don’t fit the mold that works for most other standards; programming language standards contain an order of magnitude more pages than the average standard (until recently there was a print run of new standards which then had to be stored until sold and the volume occupied by programming language standards was of note {so I’m reliably informed}), take longer to produce (i.e., more work for the bureaucrats) and all this cost is not justified by the sales figures (which are confidential and last time I saw them only just required me to take my shoes and socks off to count).
- Standards are created by the volunteers who regularly turn up at meetings.
It is only the enthusiasm of these volunteers that makes the process work. If you don’t turn up at meetings then what you think does not count (not quite true, something you write might influence the thinking of one of the worker bees who attends meetings resulting in wording in the standard).
If you really are interested in a standard then become an active member of the committee responsible for it, at least the national one and if you have the time the international one
- Committee documents can be made public.
There are no rules preventing a standards committee putting its documents on a website for Joe public to download. The issue is finding somebody willing to do the work of hosting the website (the programming language world is lucky to have Keld Simonsen) and a willingness of committee members to be open about all their documents.
Looking in from the outside it seems to me that many non-programming language committees want to maintain an aura of mystic and privileged access.
Will programming languages now have to follow ISO fast-track rules?
A while back I wrote about how updated versions of ECMAscript (i.e., the Standard for Javascript) had twice been fast tracked to replace an existing ISO Standard, however the ISO rules require that once a document becomes one of its standards all future work be done using the ISO process (i.e., you only supposed to get the one original fast track and then you have to get at least half a dozen countries to say they will actively participate in ongoing work). Thirteen years after I asked why it was being allowed to happen (as I recall I only raised the issue because I thought I had misunderstood the rules, not because I had a burning desire to enforce them) the issue has suddenly sprung to life (we are talking Standard’s world ‘sudden’ here), with a question being raised at the last SC22 meeting and a more detailed one being prepared by BSI for the next meeting (they occur once per year).
The Elephant in the room here is ISO/IEC 29500:2008, not a programming language but Microsoft’s Office Open XML; there was quite a bit of fuss when this was fast tracked.
If the ISO rules on one-time only use of the fast track process was limited to programming languages I imagine the bureaucrats in Geneva would probably never get to hear about it (SC22 would probably conclude that there was not enough interest in the various documents outside of the submitting country to form an active ISO working group; so leave well alone).
ISO sells over 19,000 standards and has better things to do than spend time on the goings on in an unfashionable part of the galaxy, unless, that is, it has the potential to generate lots of fuss that undermines credibility.
Will Microsoft try to fast track an updated version of ISO 29500? I don’t even know if they are updating it. The possibility that ISO 29500 might be updated and submitted for fast track will make it hard for SC22 to agree to any future fast-track updates to existing ISO Standards it is responsible for.
The following is a list of documents that have been fast tracked to become an ISO Standard:
ECMAScript: ECMA-262 (1st edn) = ISO 16262:1998 ECMA-262 (3rd edn) = ISO 16262:1999 ECMA-262 (5th edn) = ISO 16262:2011 C#: ECMA-334 (2nd edn) = ISO 23270:2003 ECMA-334 (4th edn) = ISO 23270:2006 CLI: ECMA-335 (2nd edn) = ISO 23271:2003 ECMA-335 (6th edn) = ISO 23271:2012 ECMA standards fast-tracked to ISO and not yet revised: ECMA-149 PCTE part 1 = ISO 13719-1:1998 ECMA-158 PCTE part 2 = ISO 13719-2:1998 ECMA-162 PCTE part 3 = ISO 13719-3:1998 ECMA-230 PCTE IDL binding = ISO 13719-4:1998 ECMA-367 EIFFEL = ISO 25436:2006 ECMA-372 C++/CLI -> DIS 26926; failed DIS ballot and project cancelled Replaced rather than revised under JTC1 rules: CHILL (from CCITT): ISO standards 9496:1989, 9496:1995, 9496:1998, 9496:2003 MUMPS/M (from Mass Gen Hospital/ANSI): ISO standards 11756:1992, 11756:1999 Non-ECMA documents fast-tracked through ISO and not yet revised: FORTH (from FORTH Inc): ISO 15145:1997 JEFF (from J consortium): ISO 20970:2002 Ruby (from Japanese Industrial Standards Committee): ISO/IEC 30170:2012
A free pdf that is not the C++ Standard
One of the most annoying things about working on programming language standards is to see the exorbitant price ISO charge for the final published document created by experts toiling away for free over many years. This practice is unlikely to change.
Once a document has been through a successfully ballot (i.e., accepted for publication as a Standard) ISO has very strict rules about what changes can be made to it prior to actual publication (only typos of the most very innocuous kind can be fixed). Of course programming language committees live on after the publication of a Standard by ISO and it is very useful for them if the document they start deliberating on is one that has had all the typos corrected, not just the really innocuous ones.
The list of typos in the 2011 C++ Standard have been fixed in the freely down loadable committee document N3337 that is not the official C++ Standard, however uncannily similar it may look (no ISO gobbledygook at the front for instance). The equivalent committee document for C is not yet available on the WG14 site.
If you really do need a copy of the C++ Standard the 2011 (i.e., latest) document in pdf form is available for $30 from ANSI; the 2011 C Standard is also available for the same price. Don’t worry about the ANSI version being dated 2012 rather than 2011; National Standards bodies must sell the ISO version at ISO prices but are allowed to publish localized versions for which they can set their own price (so you pay less and get various US specific acronyms and verbiage printed on the front cover).
Build an ISO Standard and the world will beat a path to your door
An email I received today, announcing the release of version 1.0 of the GNU Modula-2 compiler, reminded me of some plans I had to write something about a proposal to add some new definitions to the next version of the ISO C Standard.
In the 80s I was heavily involved in the Pascal community and some of the leading members of this community thought that the successor language designed by Niklaus Wirth, Modula-2, ought to be the next big language. Unfortunately for them this view was not widely shared and after much soul searching it was decided that the lack of an ISO standard for the language was responsible for holding back widespread adoption. A Modula-2 ISO Standard was produced and, as they say, the rest is history.
The C proposal involves dividing the existing definition undefined behavior into two subcategories; bounded undefined behavior and critical undefined behavior. The intent is to provide guidance to people involved with software assurance. My long standing involvement with C means that I find the technical discussions interesting; I have to snap myself out of getting too involved in them with the observation that should the proposals be included in the revised C Standard they will probably have the same impact as the publication of the ISO Standard had on Modula-2 usage.
The only way for changes to an existing language standard to have any impact on developer usage is for them to require changes to existing compiler behavior or to specify additional runtime library functionality (e.g., Extensions to the C Library Part I: Bounds-checking interfaces).
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