Standards Update
Breaking news at press time: On Friday, October 27, 2000 at the conclusion of the Toronto meeting, the C++ standards committee approved two important milestones:
1. Approved the contents of the C++ Standard’s first TC (Technical Corrigendum). The vote passed unanimously, and this material will become the first official update to the ISO/ANSI C++ Standard pending only a few more months of grinding through the routine publication mechanics and paperwork that the standards bodies require.
One of the interesting changes in the TC is that the Standard will now guarantee that vector storage is contiguous (except of course for the specialization vector<bool>), where "contiguous" means to be stored in the same way as a C-style array; see Figure 2. One reason it is important that vector be stored contiguously is so that it can be used easily as a complete drop-in replacement for C-style arrays, even when calling legacy facilities designed to operate on plain arrays; for more details, see my July/August 1999 column in C++ Report [5]. If you’re wondering why vector<bool> would get a seemingly surprising exception from this rule, see also my May 1999 column in C++ Report [6] for the scoop on that juicy little eccentricity.
2. Approved initiation of work toward a Library Extensions Technical Report. The LWG (Library Working Group) and the full committee agree that it’s time we start considering extensions to the standard library; of course, any such extensions won’t appear in an official standard for probably at least three years yet, if not more, but the point is that there are things that the community wants/needs and that we ought to start working into the standard library. Commonly requested items include things like hash-based containers, regular expressions, smart pointers, and expression templates, among other facilities.
Between now and the next meeting (Copenhagen, April 29 - May 4, 2001) we will be drafting an official ISO request for a New Work Item, which essentially translates to "a request for ISO’s blessing/authorization to do this work." I fully expect this request to be drafted and approved by/at the Copenhagen meeting; and after a few more months’ worth of bureaucratic machinery we should be officially in business by summer. Of course, some people have already been starting to work on such facilities in anticipation of this approval; if you haven’t checked out Boost yet, be sure to do so at www.boost.org.
