Standard Languages
C++ is one of the few widely-used progamming languages that have been placed under control of a standards body. The definition of the language began in the late 1980's, when the inventor of the language, Bjarne Stroustrup, began writing a reference manual for use by programmers interested in the new language. With the support of both AT&T Bell Laboratories and Hewlett-Packard, the language's documentation was put forth as an ANSI standard. In 1991, work began on establishing C++ as a international standard. In 1998, the International Standards Organization (ISO Web site) formally ratified the specifications for C++. The standard is formally known as "ISO/IEC 14882:1998" (source). Its length is 776 printed pages.
Another aspect of C++ that has been formally standardized is called the Standard Library and adds significant capabilities to the language. It takes advantage of C++ templates and the concept of generic programming to give programmers the opportunity to use a wealth of pre-written algorithms and programming paradigms.
C++ is still improving and evolving.
The ISO continues working on other aspects of the language, and actively maintains an "Active Issues List" for C++ and the accompanying Standard Library. One of the current projects involves extensions to the Standard Library, but this may be rolled into a proposed new version of C++, which some refer to as "C++0x" (source).
C#, a language that shares much in common with C++ and Java, has been submitted to
ECMA,
the European Computer Manufacturers Association. The ECMA standard for C# is
ECMA-334,
and is available for downloading as a
PDF
from ECMA's Web site. In Microsoft's Visual Studio.net, C# works in conjunction with Microsoft's
Common Language Infrastructure (CLI), which has also been submitted to ECMA,
as ECMA-335.
Notes on the ISO
The ISO is involved with many other types of standards, such as:
- MICR and OCR fonts
- OSI, a networking standard
- SQL, a database definition and query language
- MPEG, which deal with digital audio and video storage formats:
- MPEG-1, "the standard for storage and retrieval of moving pictures and audio on storage media"
- MPEG-2, "the standard for digital television"
- MPEG-4, "the standard for multimedia applications"MPEG is now developing:
- MPEG-7, "the content representation standard for multimedia information search, filtering, management and processing"
- MPEG-21, a new multimedia framework. (source of the above list and quotes)
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