The Shape of Code

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).