JTC1/SC22/WG10 (no longer active) - Guidelines

last revised 8 April 1996

ISO/IEC JTC1/SC22/WG10 Guidelines was established as its WG16 by SC22's predecessor committee, ISO TC97/SC5, at the plenary meeting in Ottawa in 1983, and held its first meeting in January 1984. It was inherited by the new SC22 when it started work in 1985. The remit of WG10 was to review the programming languages field to identify areas of commonality which might be suitable for standardization, to produce a report, with recommendations to the subcommittee on ways of reducing unnecessary divergence between programming language standards, including suggestions for possible new work items, and to produce a draft set of guidelines for SC5 giving advice on how to prepare programming language standards.

SC5/WG16 and its successor SC22/WG10 held ten meetings between 1984 and 1986, and produced, as well as the draft guidelines, an interim report followed by a final report (document SC22/N0249). These reports, among other things, recommended new work items to assist the development of commonality for datatypes and procedure calling. These work items were in due course established, assigned to WG11 for development, and eventually resulted in the two standards ISO/IEC 11404:1995 Language independent datatypes and ISO/IEC 13886:1995 Language independent procedure calling.

WG10's final report was produced in April 1986 and, as had been resolved at the 1985 SC22 plenary meeting in Paris, was then disbanded, having completed its assignments. Its convenor (Brian Meek, UK) remained as project editor to steer the guidelines document through its stages for publication as an ISO Technical Report, Guidelines for the preparation of programming language standards. The Technical Report was published in 1991 and is currently being revised, in respect of the use of character sets and other internationalization aspects only, by WG20 Internationalization.

Approved international specification produced:


This page prepared by Brian Meek, last revised 8 April 1996