Re: C++ standard committee censor different opinions

From: Andrew Koenig (ark_at_acm.org)
Date: 07/08/04 

Date: Thu, 08 Jul 2004 16:11:18 GMT

"P.J. Plauger" <pjp@dinkumware.com> wrote in message
news:ZldHc.30420$6e7.14015@nwrddc03.gnilink.net...

> > > Perhaps. But you might be interested to learn that Andy Koenig
> > > woke up a few years ago and gave a talk proposing changes to
> > > Standard C++ that are remarkably close to what Microsoft had
> > > already begun and has now become C++/CLI.
> >
> > Really? CLI mainly has three parts that C++ is lack of: VM, garbage
> > collection, and middleware platform. For the VM and garbage
> > collection, it is not in the spirit of C++. Would Andy Koenig prefer
> > those?
>
> Dunno, ask him. But *many* people have experimented with garbage
> collection in C++, spirit or no spirit. Lucky for us all, no
> single person is in charge of enforcing the "spirit of C++" --
> not even BS, who has the best claim for that role.

I'd like to explain my position, because I don't think Bill Plauger has it
quite right--although I can understand how he, or anyone who sees little of
me outside standards meetings, might have gotten the impression that he did.

First, it's not accurate to say that I "woke up," because that phrase
suggests that I suddenly changed my opinion to consider facts to which I had
previously been oblivious. In fact, the opinions that I presented to the
C++ committee were ones that I had held for many years,. I had not
expressed them to the committe before then only because I felt that they
were outside the committee's purview. Indeed, even when I gave that talk, I
still felt that it was outside their purview, which was why I asked to
present my viewpoint in a "technical session" rather than as part of the
committee's official deliberations.

Next, it's slightly inaccurate to say that I "proposed changes" to Standard
C++. If I remember correctly, I argued that

    1) C++ has some siginificant limitations, which are becoming more
significant as the nature of our software and hardware systems change.

    2) I do not see how those limitations can be addressed within the
framework of Standard C++ as it stands today. (Note: when I say that I
don't see how to address them, I am not using that claim as a euphemism for
an opinion that they cannot be addressed--indeed part of the reason for
giving the talk is the hope that someone else will figure out how to address
them)

    3) I think that it is inevitable that programming languages similar to
C++ will evolve in response to those limitations. The standards committee
does not have a choice about whether or not that evolution will happen; its
only choice is about whether or not it will be a part of it.

My conclusion that I hoped that someone close to the committee would try
some experiments with other C++-like languages that tried to address some of
these problems, regardless of whether they wound up influencing the
evolution of the C++ standard directly, but that doing so would require more
resources than I could personally control.

I hoped that one possible result might be a language that is similar to, and
strongly interoperable with, C++ that could deal with some of the problems
that would require incompatible changes to C++ to solve.

It was only after that talk that I even learned of the existence of
Microsoft's C++/CLI efforts. Apparently someone at Microsoft looked at the
same facts that I did and independently drew similar conclusions.

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