Subject: SC22 N2473 - SC22 Chairman Response to JTC 1 re Technical Direction and Organization

From: "william c. rinehuls" <[email-masked]>
Date: Wed, 14 May 1997 18:12:21 -0400 (EDT)

_________________ beginning of title page ___________________________
ISO/IEC JTC 1/SC22
Programming languages, their environments and system software interfaces
Secretariat:  U.S.A.  (ANSI)

ISO/IEC JTC 1/SC22
N2473

May 1997

TITLE:              SC22 Chairman's Response to Questions to JTC 1
                    National Bodies and Subcommittees Regarding JTC 1
                    Technical Directions and Organization

SOURCE:             Secretariat, ISO/IEC JTC 1/SC22

WORK ITEM:          N/A

STATUS:             N/A

CROSS REFERENCE:    SC22 N2460

DOCUMENT TYPE:      N/A

ACTION:             To SC22 Member Bodies and WG Conveners for	
                    information.

Address reply to:
ISO/IEC JTC 1/SC22 Secretariat
William C. Rinehuls
8457 Rushing Creek Court
Springfield, VA 22153  USA
Tel:  +1 (703) 912-9680
Fax:  +1 (703) 912-2973
email:  [email-masked]

___________________end of title page; beginning of text ________________

SC 22 COMMENTS ON JTC 1 N 4631

1.  Do you consider that your present projects * align with the proposed
recommendation? 
    If not please provide rationale for a different alignment within the
overall set of technical directions. 

     The present projects in SC 22 align completely with the technical
direction entitled, "Programming Languages and Software Interfaces." 

     Following are SC 22 comments, as requested by the JTC 1 Chairman
during the April 1997 Ad Hoc on Reengineering, on the inclusion of
"language bindings" in the description of this technical direction.  These
comments relate to bindings between a programming language standard and a
standard for supplementary functionality not defined within the language
standard. 

     Development of a standard for a language binding requires knowledge
and expertise in two areas - the standard for the technical subject of the
binding and the standard for the programming language involved.  Thus, for
example, the development of the GKS Fortran binding required expertise in
both GKS and Fortran.  It has generally been the case in the past that the
binding is best produced by experts in the technical subject of the
binding rather than by programming language experts.  As a result, the
language bindings developed in SC 22 have involved bindings to technical
areas within SC 22, e.g., POSIX or PCTE, but not to technical areas in
other SCs, e.g., graphics bindings in SC24.  SC 22 believes this division
of work is appropriate.  There may be times when a language binding would
be produced by the language experts but such cases should be assigned on a
case by case basis and are not the general rule. 

2.  Do you believe your current projects* within the proposed technical
direction will benefit from a synergistic fit with other projects,* (if
any) in your technical direction? 

     There are no other projects in our technical direction. 

3. Do you believe any of your current projects require significant
interactions with projects* in other technical directions?
    If so which ones? 

     Interactions may be needed in two directions.  SC 22 may need to take
account of other JTC 1 standards in the development of SC 22 standards,
and some SC 22 standards may be useful to other JTC 1 technical directions
in the development of their standards. 

     In the first category, interactions may be required: 
          -- with projects in the Data Base/Data Management area in the
Distributed Application Services technical direction; 
          -- with coding projects in the Multimedia & Representation
technical direction; 
          -- with projects on security functionality in the Security
technical direction; and
          -- with projects on user-system interfaces in the User
Interfaces technical direction. 

     In the second category, interactions may be required: 
          -- for language bindings as noted above in the response to
question 1; 
          -- with the Distributed Applications Services technical
direction (and probably others as well) with respect to ISO/IEC 11404,
Language Independent Datatypes and ISO/IEC 13886, Language Independent
Procedure Calling; and
          -- with the Data Capture technical direction with respect to
possible applicability of ISO/IEC 14977, Syntactic metalanguage - Extended
BNF. 

4a. Do you believe supplementary standardization activity should be
undertaken to sufficiently address the technical direction and which adds
value to the work of JTC 1?  For example there appears to be added
standardization needs in the technical direction "Security"  beyond the
present work program of SC27. 

     From time to time, supplementary standardization activity will be
required in additional programming languages or additional software
interfaces, as may be required in the marketplace.  A current example is
the development of standards related to the use of Java** which is under
study by the SC 22 Java Study Group. 

4b.  Do you consider that the resources to address these areas will be
available? 

     Yes.  Where sufficient market interest exists, resources can be
expected to be available.  The location of these resources may influence
that development method used for the standard, e.g., development by an SC
22 working group; assignment by SC 22 of development responsibility to a
National Body; use of the fast-track process or the PAS process. 

** Java is a trademark of Sun Microsystems, Inc. 

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