N3150 - Editor's Report, Post January-February 2023 Meeting

Welcome to Editor's Report n3150, which is for the Standard Draft n3149.

You can read the last draft's editor's report here.

This report is after the second block of the Committee Draft 2 (CD2) National Body (NB) Comment Balloting. There were 238 comments made against the standard this time around, some requiring complex papers to integrate and others as straightforward and formatting fixes. Despite this, it was the formatting fixes that proved most vexing in a variety of cases, while all text changes were integrated more or less seamlessly.

Transparency Changes

ISO/IEC SC22 JTC1 has mandated drafts during the "DIS" stage of drafting and balloting for ISO/IEC 9899:2023 must be viewable only by those in the ISO/IEC Global Directory. Therefore, the document n3149 — the latest working draft — will be in a password-protected zip file. The password is available from the Convenor if you can confirm you are part of the ISO/IEC Global Directory. If you do not know what that is, chances are you aren't a part of your National Body or an ISO/IEC Expert.

Apologies if this is an impediment to anyone's workflow.

Changes and Fixes

Errors from the first integration of CD1 pointed out in the CD2 NB Comments were handled, as well as any sent in by users at this time.

There are hundreds of changes made to the C Standard in this time frame, in response to the NB Comments. The full list of them is NOT displayed in this document. Instead, one will need to read through n3148 to get the relevant list of changes. Every change made was from an either accepted, accepted-with-comment, or similar National Body comment in n3148.

Additional changes were made editorially based on feedback from random comments people saw fit to submit to unrelated GitHub repositories of the editors, e-mails the editors have received, or other communication since then, including from Telegram, Twitter, and the Fediverse.

For the list of comments that were successfully applied, see this document. Comments that were successfully applied have a "✅" in the second column. Comments that have not yet been applied (but will be) have a "❌" in the second column. (It's a living document so if everything isn't "✅" you should see it change from week to week until everything is done.)

Larger Changes

Some of the larger changes were made to solve formatting issues. In particular:

  • Annexes C, E, and I all gained a top-level section number and, possibly, a "fluff" Introduction section before a second section was made after a single parapgrah. These were necessary to prevent LaTeX from freaking out and using old sections / old annexes for its footer desginations, which was reported to the editors at least 5 separate times and was starting to get on my nerves. It also brought us further in compliance with how these documents are meant to be styled. This was a one-person unilateral editorial decision to get things out the door, and certainly not agreed upon, but here's to hoping nobody loses their mind about the changes.
  • Colors are not part of the official ISO standard / DIS Ballot. Therefore, this version of the draft standard and its friends will not have any color. The color will return once C23 is finished publishing.
  • A table has appeared in Annex M containing a __has_c_attrbiute value list and associated changes. In the next revision of this document (after C23 is published), we hope to add another section just below this one that lists every configurable macro and its value history (beyond just __STDC_VERSION__), including when it was introduced into the C standard. This will help users appropriately rely on and document the various standard values of these macros in the future.

Paper Submissions

The new paper submission system is still taking time. Life's hard when you're in the C23 crunch; deepest apologies! We hope to have it up for paper submissions for when the next revision of the standard opens up for contributions.

— JeanHeyd Meneide, Project Editor <wg14@soasis.org>