Departments
DepartmentsI just learned via e-mail that some folks want to begin developing an ISO standard for Java. The decision to do so, or not, will have been made by the time you read this. For my part, I know better than to volunteer for yet another standards effort. (See last month's Editor's Forum, for example.) But I'm sure lots of other people will happily pitch in to do the job.
Whether the job should be done now is another matter. Seems to me that Sun has been doing a pretty respectable job of keeping the language stable enough for third-parties to match, yet flexible enough to adapt as people find out what Java is really good for. I have a few ideas along those lines myself, and I hate to see premature standardization interfere with the field debugging of a decent language spec. There's still a real place in the world for de facto industry standards, I think.
On that subject, I got to make an interesting announcement at the Embedded Systems Conference in San Jose last September. (Our sister publication, Embedded Systems Programming, is a major driving force behind this twice yearly event.) A consortium of several large Japanese companies has developed a subset of C++ for writing embedded applications. The Embedded C++ Technical Committee, as they call themselves, is making this spec freely available to interested parties in the hopes of minimizing the proliferation of subsets as people apply C++ to applications with tight time and memory constraints.
My interest in Embedded C++, as some of you might guess, is in supplying the library to be shipped with compilers from various vendors. With the likes of Fujitsu, Hitachi, NEC, and Toshiba behind this effort, I figure it bids fair to become a widely used dialect all around the world, not just in Japan. I also suspect it will prove of interest to more than just programmers of embedded systems.
I can only hope that we all get to fine tune the language and library for a year or so before some ambitious souls decide it's time to nail everything down in an international standard. But with Java under the microscope already, who knows.
P.J. Plauger
P.S. Bobby Schmidt celebrates his first anniversary as a columnist in an interesting way this month -- he's not here. He just plain got too busy doing all those other things that make him knowledgable enough to write a good column. He'll be back next month.