[LEAPSECS] Common Calendar Time (CCT) -Brooks Harris

[Joseph S. Myers]

On Sun, 19 Jan 2014, Steve Allen wrote:


> On Sun 2014-01-19T07:39:51 +0000, Clive D.W. Feather hath writ:

> > When I was on the ISO C (*NOT* "ANSI c") committee, we looked at the issue.

> > Then we asked the expert community (that is, you lot), to come up with a

> > consensus proposal that we could look at. As far as I know, the committee

> > is still waiting.

> 

> Where is the record of the communication?

> To whom was it addressed and how was it sent?

> If someone wants to contact the committee how should that be done?


sc22wg14 at open-std.org (emails from non-members of the list are moderated).

Note that:

* The ISO C standard is not currently being revised, and while it isn't 
being revised it's not possible to vote things into a future revision 
(beyond Technical Corrigenda in response to Defect Reports); you need to 
wait for work to start on a new version.

* The other option for proposed ISO C features is a Technical 
Specification, but there's a complicated process to start work on one, 
involving several countries supporting a New Work Item Proposal.  You 
won't get a TS started without several committee members interested in 
working on it (and I haven't seen evidence of such interest in WG14).  And 
then a TS does not form part of ISO C, unless the C standard is revised 
and it's proposed and agreed to integrate the TS into it.  You can have a 
study group, like the current one for parallel language extensions, 
without going through that process, but you still need several committee 
members interested.

(There may be other options available under ISO processes, e.g. a 
normative amendment such as was done for C90 in 1994/1995.  I don't think 
they are likely to be applied in this case; there's been a need lately in 
SC22 to push back on a notion coming from (at least some bits of) 
ISO/IEC/JTC1 that TCs should only be issued within two or three years of 
standard publication and after that there should be a new edition.)

* Nothing happens in the C standard (when it *is* being revised) without a 
WG14 paper proposing specific textual changes to be made to the standard.

* There has sometimes been a mood in WG14 not to standardize things 
without existing implementation practice.  The extent to which that rule 
is followed varies (it was stated at the start of C11 development, but 
then major features went in without such implementation practice).  
Similar views have sometimes been expressed in POSIX.

So, to improve ISO C standards for time and timezones and related issues 
you need several interested committee members working on proposed 
specifications, producing implementations of those specifications as 
evidence of implementation practice (preferably) and attending meetings to 
champion the proposals.

(I'm the convenor of the UK C panel.)

-- 
Joseph S. Myers
jsm at polyomino.org.uk