The British Standards Institution claims that companies eagerly awaiting the publication by the American National Standards Institution of the ANSI C standard are likely to be disappointed because an appeal has been made to ANSI to reject the current C draft on the grounds that it is damaging to embedded system programmers. As appeals processes within standards bodies take a considerable time to complete, formal publication of the standard is now not expected until December at the earliest – event though the current draft – X3J11/88-158 – is unlikely to be modified. As far as C++ is concerned, proposals for its standardisation have been put forward by Denmark and the US, but the British body thinks it unlikely that this process will be carried out by the ANSI C committee, and is pushing for an international effort from the start. The UK Institution would also like to hear from anyone interested in participating in the standardisation effort for the object-oriented C++ derivative of the C language.
