N3221 - Editor's Report, Post January 2024 Meeting

Welcome to Editor's Report n3221, which is for the Standard Drafts n3219 (ISO DIS Preliminary Draft) and n3220 (C2Y Working Draft).

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

This report is after the final block of comemnts ISO/IEC JTC1 SC22 WG14 DIS Ballot Comments. There were over 150 comments made against the standard this time around, all handled at the January 2024 WG14 Meeting in Strasbourg, France. Many thanks to Jens Gustedt and INRIA for hosting us there!

Furthermore, a special thanks to:

for not only sending in fixes but volunteering to help tweak and fix the Preliminary C23 n3219 DIS Ballot Draft before a final version will be sent to ISO for publication. I am very thankful for their tireless efforts in making sure the C standard is the highest possible quality it can be.

Transparency Changes

An unlocked, non-C23 version of the latest working draft PDF is availabe in n3220.

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 n3219 — the Preliminary DIS Ballot 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.

Changes and Fixes

All of the changes were clarity, typo, index, and referencing fixes. No changes were made to technical content between the previous working draft and the latest one present here. All DIS comments that were accepted have been (mostly) integrated, subject to a final review of the C23 Editorial Team selected in Strasbourg, France in January 2024. No further technical changes are planned. WG14's official disposition on the comments can be viewed at n3216.

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.

Some changes of note:

  • Most (🙏) of the Index should be cleaned up now, but there are likely still some stragglers from the Annex F/H Floating Point terminology increase. Those will be cleaned up before the final copy is sent to ISO/IEC for publication, after the Editorial team has gotten through most of the existing changes.
  • Language was changed to be in accorance with ISO/IEC Directives, Part 2 in almost all sections, including temporal/spatial references being made format-neutral and wording choices honed in with respect to "must", "should", "may", "can", "shall", and "similar".
  • Hanging paragraphs, in accordinate with ISO/IEC Directives, Part 2 from all of the Annexes (Annexes A-H) and all of the Language (Clause 6) section, were undone and turned into General subclauses. The Library section (Clause 7) was not done because some of those paragraph numbers and section references may change in unanticipated ways if all Hanging parapgrahs were fixed; therefore, it is necessary to evaluate this change long-term.
  • All languages in notes and examples were fixed, with the caveat that ISO/IEC Directives, Part 2 does not specify the proper verbiage to use in either notes or examples to replace terminolog such as "may", "can", "should", "could", and similar terms. Thus, notes and examples may contain a some of that verbiage still as a suitable replacement was neither in the Directives nor ISO/IEC House Style rules. This will be addressed in the next edition of the standard after asking for more appropriate verbal forms for such locations from ISO/IEC.

For the list of ISO Comments that were successfully applied, see this document. Comments that were successfully applied have a "✅" in their "Merged" column.

C2Y Specific Changes

C2Y is the next version of the C Standard that is supposed to come out in ~6 years time (2030 at the latest). A charter is still being drafted and discussed for this version of C. Many papers were discussed at the January 2024 Strasbourg, France meeting that indicate that this upcoming version of C may seriously address several deficiencies and long-time asks of the C Community, while keeping to its root strengths overall.

Specifically for the PDF Draft n3220, the only C2Y specific change that has approval is an editorial one to fix a footnote in Annex K to state "potentially reserved" rather than just "reserved". There are no other changes between the n3220 and n3219.

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>