N2733 - Editor's Report, Post-March/April Virtual Meeting, 2021

Welcome to Editor's Report N2733, which is for the Standard N2731. Papers that were integrated this time around are included in the frontmatter of N2731. This report is for the post-March Virtual Meeting 2021, in the very literal sense that it is (sometime) after the March meeting (it is October 18th, 2021, after all, which is a very, very far time away).

Unfortunately, there are no Diffmarks anymore because in integrating these papers into the LaTeX we have irreversibly broken the LaTeX diffmark engine (it worked by checking in temporary files to the Git, and we removed that because checking in temporary files generated by the build process is not a good idea anyhow). That means the related C Working Draft Diffmarks, N2732, is going to not exist until probably a few weeks later as the diff-creation process is completely reworked!

Integration

This includes a small bundle of papers approved during the March/April 2021 virtual meeting and a lot of editorial fixes that were done before. This working draft wasn't submitted back when intended (May 2021), so this editor's report is not going to be as thorough as the others. Expect another editor's report and working draft that rolls in all changes from the June 2021 and August/September 2021 virtual meetings. The Annex X (Decimal Floating Point) changes have not been fully integrated (there is no Annex X in this release). My greatest apologies! Unfortunately, the general situation of (* gestures furtively to Outside *) and the death of a few close friends, alongside the mass disabling of others and the general dissolution of any belief that my fellow human beings would care even a µ-iota about others had drastically reduced the ability to keep up with Standardization.

Please check over both the diffmarks and the Working Draft itself to make sure the changes you expected from your paper were done properly. We have -- at this point -- had to quintuple check the changes, but it never hurts to have an extra pair of eyes!

Full Integrations - March/April 2021 Virtual Meeting

The papers that were integrated without issues - as done by following the issue and merge request trackers at the C Standard GitLab Instance - for the Match/April 2021 Virtual Meeting are as follows:

  • N2524 - String Functions for Freestanding Implementations (This was a holdover that was approved before the 2021 meeting, that slipped through the cracks.)

  • N2626 - Digit Separators

  • N2630 - Formatting Input/Output of Binary Integer Numbers

  • N2640 - Missing DEC_EVAL_METHOD, Take 2

  • N2641 - Missing +(x) in Table

  • N2643 - Negative vs. Less Than Zero

  • N2645 - Add Support for Preprocessing Directives #elifdef and #elifndef

  • N2680 - Specific Width Length Modifier for Formatting

Incomplete Integrations

Some papers were approved but will take some time to integrate properly.

  • N2601: Annex IEC 60559 interchange and extended types (updates previously approved version, N2561)

This has not yet been integrated. It is the next priority before the June and August/September 2021 Virtual Meeting approved changes and additional editorial comments.

Editorial Changes

There were a number of tiny editorial improvements to make and adjustments to be had to papers integrated and to the standard itself:

  • 6.5.2.1 Example "int``s" vs. "object(s) of type ``int"

    A clarity improvement since some implementers were interpreting the wording in slightly conflicting manners.

  • String Copying Functions Moved

    Some string copying functions were not withing the rigth sub-clause. They were moved to be next to the other copying functions.

  • N2626 - Digit Separators

    An example was a bit unclear, so it was workshopped on the mailing list.

  • "non-negative" vs. "nonnegative"

    A small consistency type: it should be "nonnegative" everywhere.

  • "is close to zero" converted to "is too close to zero"

    A few places where the wording was imprecise and not properly recorded from integrated papers related to Floating Point.

  • "infinity (...)" not similar to "(...) zero" description uses

    A few places where the use of an adjective/adverb with infinity/zero were inconsistent. They were made similar.

Paper Submissions

Papers are still to be submitted in the old fashion, but work continues on a new paper system for WG14 to enable the Committee to:

  • iterate faster on papers;

  • upload and view papers faster; and

  • be able to establish a proper history for visiblity.

The new paper system will be here before the end of the year. (This should be taken as an extremely literal "before December 31st, 2021 turns into January 1st, 2022 in the U.S. Pacific Timezone".)

Thank you for contributing to and working to improve the C Standard!

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