Tuesday, November 13, 2007

Smalltalk ANSI gets rolling - join in!

Work is now well under way to get the Smalltalk ANSI standardization process restarted. We have a mail list up and running and Paolo Bonzini has set up a wiki for the project.

We already have the Smalltalk vendor companies involved, and that is very important. What we also need are people who use Smalltalk as an application programming language. If you are on a project that uses Smalltalk then I suggest that you have a member of that project sign up to the ANSI Smalltalk list. If you want Smalltalk to do what *you* need in the future then you need to get involved now.

One of the valuable things that ANSI provides is a structured way of forming a consensus. While we can (and do!) have very illuminating discussions on our mailing lists and on comp.lang.smalltalk, it is hard to turn the resulting ideas into something that everyone can use. The ANSI process lets us do that.

It will be free to participate in the debates and in informal voting. Formal voting will require formal membership of the ANSI INCITS project and that is not free. Perhaps your company could support a member of your team on the formal committee?

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