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Does the C++ standards committee provide (on the open standard site or elsewhere) any indicatation of the status of the papers under consideration and indexed on the open-standards site? I am referring to the individual "papers" indicating potential changes to the standard, with associated discussion, as per the example below; I am not referring to the (published or draft) standard as a whole.

For instance, how can I determine whether N3922 has been accepted or rejected?

Kyle Strand
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    @CoryKramer I think you've misunderstood the question. I'm not asking for the status of the *standard as a whole*; I'm asking about the status of individual "papers" (this terminology sounds vague to me, but it's the term used by the open standard site) such as N3922 (as I mentioned). – Kyle Strand Jun 24 '15 at 17:36
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    I don't believe questions on the standards process should be considered requests for outside resources. There are a large number of C++ questions that are unanswerable without referring to the process or linking to specific issue being handled by the committee. – Shafik Yaghmour Jun 24 '15 at 19:57

1 Answers1

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For this particular case, we can guess this is an Evolution Working Group(EWG) issue from the Background section of the paper which says:

In Issaquah, EWG considered two alternative resolutions; this paper offers wording for one of the two, and mentions the other only as an acceptable alternative in case CWG uncovers fatal problems with EWG's preferred resolution.

We can see from the latest C++ Standard Evolution Completed Issues List that the status of N3922 is WP. For the Evolution Working Group the issue statues are defined on the active issues list we an see WP stands for:

WP - (Working Paper) - The proposed resolution has not been accepted as a Technical Corrigendum, but the full WG21/PL22.16 committee has voted to apply the issue's resolution to the working paper.

and indeed issue 161 which is tracking this paper says:

Adopted into the working draft in Urbana, as N3922.

We can find the latest issues list for EWG and Core from the latest mailings and the latest mailings can be found off of the main WG21 site and going to the papers section and going to the latest date.

In the general case, the post meeting mailing Disposition column will tell you the status of a paper, for example from 2015 the post-Lenexa mailing shows the Disposition column for proposal N4508 A proposal to add shared_mutex (untimed) (Revision 4) says Adopted 2015-05 and we can confirm by looking at the latest draft standard which is also part of the mailing: N4527 Working Draft, Standard for Programming Language C++ and it indeed contain the new and modified wording. We can also usually find the latest draft standard by going to this answer from the question "Where do I find the current C or C++ standard documents?"

This may not always be helpful, in this case of N3922 was only listed in the post-Issaquah mailing and has an empty Disposition but was later adopted Urbana but there is no indication of this in the post-Urbana mailing.

What does "post-Issaquah" and "post-Urbana" mean?

The C++ standards meetings are usually referred to by the names of the places they took place. We can find a complete list on the isocpp.org site in the Upcoming Meetings, Past Meetings section. So for the example the May 2015 meeting took place in Lenexa, Kansas.

Before and after each meeting there is a mailing that lists all the documents relevant to that meeting and these are referred to as the pre and post meeting mailings, So for Lenexa we have the pre-Lenexa mailing and post-Lenexa mailing. The post meeting mailing will contain meeting minutes, updated proposals and potentially the Disposition of the proposal, the latest working draft of the standard, updated issues lists etc...

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Shafik Yaghmour
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  • Of course, the EWG issues list can only be used to track recent papers proposing a core language change, which is a subset of all papers. – T.C. Jun 24 '15 at 22:47
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    @T.C. indeed, you are correct, which is why I was careful to say it was for this particular case. I am planning on expanding it but I don't think I will get to it till tomorrow, most of this I have figured out through trial and error and so explaining it well requires some thought. For defects and active issues it is relatively straight forward, for proposals it usually requires going through the minutes. – Shafik Yaghmour Jun 25 '15 at 03:20
  • "most of this I have figured out through trial and error" -- and here I was somewhat hoping that I'd just overlooked something obvious! Very disappointing, but thank you for sharing what you've learned. – Kyle Strand Jun 25 '15 at 16:31
  • @KyleStrand I am not part of the committee so my insight is limited to what is publicly available. There are several members of the committee that regularly contribute here, so perhaps one of them will come by and comment on something I have missed or maybe add their own answer. – Shafik Yaghmour Jun 25 '15 at 18:01
  • @KyleStrand it might make sense to unaccept my answer for now since it may attract more attention and perhaps some insightful comments or maybe a better answer. This is a good question, I will keep extending my answer as I get a chance. – Shafik Yaghmour Jun 25 '15 at 18:08
  • I forgot that unanswered questions can get better visibility. I'll do that. – Kyle Strand Jun 25 '15 at 18:12
  • What does "post-Issaquah" and "post-Urbana" mean?? – template boy Jun 26 '15 at 15:07
  • It helps a lot. Thank you. – template boy Jun 26 '15 at 20:36
  • It seems that recently that the "disposition" column is only filled for papers written at a meeting and disposed of at the same meeting. – T.C. Jul 06 '15 at 20:48
  • @T.C. that makes sense considering the numbering of the documents just increases so we will never see a previous document in a mailing or at least I have not seen that happen. Many papers get revised and so in those cases you will see the same proposal in the pre and post mailing with different numbers. So if a proposal gets accepted unrevised or a current revision gets accepted at a late meeting this won't show help us. – Shafik Yaghmour Jul 07 '15 at 00:00
  • I had forgotten about this question and your suggestion of un-accepting your answer; since no more answers have appeared, I'll re-accept it. – Kyle Strand Dec 30 '15 at 20:04
  • It seems like the committee has been trying to improve visibility into the process and the status of the standard; do you or @T.C. know if the situation has changed since you answered? – Kyle Strand Jul 02 '16 at 10:59