Where Is the Standard Headed?

This book is based on these ECMA and ISO standards:

• ECMA: Standard ECMA-335, 2nd Edition, December 2002.

• ISO: ISO/IEC 23271:2003(E), Information Technology Common Language Infrastructure (CLI).

But standards are living documents. The ECMA technical committee that is responsible for the technical content of the CLI standard is working to refine and improve the standard. The committee's plan is to create an ECMA edition 3, and then submit it to ISO. Some of the topics under discussion for possible inclusion in a future standard are the following:

• Generics

• Extended threading

• Exception reordering/runtime check disablement

• Debugging enhancements

• Extensible metadata

Generics seem to be the next step in the object-oriented community, and they are likely to be included in a future version of the standard. In the current version, it is not possible to transmit debug information to another debugger, and this change is currently under discussion. Also under discussion are some enhancements that would make it easier to extend the metadata.

Although the CLI standard does not embrace all one might expect in a platform (such as the inclusion of a windowing library or a graphics library), it is felt that these still evolve too rapidly to be standardized. The standard permits anyone to develop these because it lays out the basis for library development.