This is one of a series of pages explaining the changes made to C++ by the joint ISO/ANSI C++ committee (in the ISO/IEC 14882:1998 document) since Bjarne Stroustrup's ARM (Annotated Reference Manual) was published. You can find further information in Overload, including my Casting Vote and So you want to be a cOOmpiler writer? columns.

The current status (May '04) is that the committee are actively working on the next version of the C++ International Standard. See the WG21 Open Standards website.

I'd like to thank the members of the committee for their various contributions to both the Standard and these pages, especially Bjarne Stroustrup - the language's originator, Andrew Koenig - the project editor, Steve Rumsby - maintainer of the UK C++ information site & my roommate on most of the C++ standards meetings and Nathan Myers - an incisive mind. (Check out their web pages in the Resources section).

I haven't been involved with the C++ Standards process since 1999 but I've left these pages up since they still get a lot of traffic and, as far as I know, are still accurate. I've just updated a few paragraphs here and there to reflect the current status of the process. I try to do that regularly but in reality I need someone to remind me so it only gets done about once a year!