The Design and Evolution of C++, First Edition

6. Standardization

Don’t you try to outweird me, I get stranger things than you free with my breakfast cereal.

— Zaphod Beeblebrox

What is a standard? — aims of the C++ standards effort — how does the committee operate? — who is on the committee? — language clarifications — name lookup rules — lifetime of temporaries — criteria for language extension — list of proposed extensions — keyword arguments — an exponentiation operator — restricted pointers — character sets.

6.1 What is a Standard?

There is much confusion in the minds of programmers about what a standard is and what it ought to be. One ideal for a standard is to completely specify exactly which programs are legal and exactly what the meaning of every such program is. For C and C++ at ...