POSIX					    JTC1/SC22/WG15 N243
_________________________________________________________________



Date:  December 4, 1991



Supersedes:  n/a



Title:	IEEE 1003.1LIS Programming Language Scope



Source: U.S.



Action Requested:  none



Detail:
	  This document contains information relevant to the  re-
	  view of WG15 N222 and N223.










































	    IEEE 1003.1LIS Programming Language Scope

			U.S. Contribution

			December 4, 1991






The universe of programming languages is quite large and diverse,
including such subclasses as functional, procedural, and declara-
tive languages, and untyped, statically-typed,	and  dynamically-
typed  languages.   As a result, the requirements for a language-
independent specification method for system services, that is ca-
pable	of  supporting	language  bindings  for all  programming
languages, are not well understood.

In developing the draft language-independent revision of  ISO/IEC
9945-1: 1990  a  practical approach has been taken.  The minimal
requirement was to support the	existing  language  binding  pro-
jects:	C, Ada, FORTRAN, and now Modula-2.  The methods developed
were designed to support the general class  of	statically-typed,
procedural programming languages.  This generalization of the re-
quirements is intended to meet the needs  of  bindings	to  other
"conventional"	programming  languages	such as BASIC, COBOL, and
Pascal. Support for languages outside of this class may  require
revisions  to  the  methods  chosen, to "abstract away" remaining
language-dependent features.

Reviewers of WG15 N222 and N223 are invited to consider the  spe-
cial  requirements for language-independent specification support
of language bindings for languages such as C++, Lisp, and Prolog,
and to suggest changes to the specification methods used in these
documents to widen the range of supported language bindings.