WG21's "Direction Group" is a handful of "experienced" people, by-invitation only, which has "been decided" (by itself of course, with a little help from Herb) to choose the future direction of C++. It further decided that to shape their work they should consult what was written in a book and in several papers about C++, all of them written by one of its members, Bjarne Stroustrup.
It reserves the right to chime in on absolutely everything, and has an "expectation" that everybody else (e.g. chairs of sub-committees) will take the Direction Group's advice.
> Concepts Lite is a consequence of ISO politics, it was either that or nothing all.
On the contrary, WG21 had voted in C++ 0x Concepts for the standard which would eventually become C++ 11 but after that Bjarne wrote a paper claiming that you don't need all these fancy features other people designed. You do, which is why C++ 20 Concepts achieves so little - but his paper was influential.
Over the next several months, the argument was made that C++ 0x shouldn't have this complicated C++ 0x Concepts feature which they had voted in because it wasn't implemented yet, and anyway Bjarne says it's not necessary. As JeanHeyd Meneide has observed it's weird, sometimes WG21 feels like it's absolutely crucial to have a working implementation, but then other times (cough modules) they don't see this as important at all and ship the standard with basically a TBD sticker. See if you can guess which WG21 member wanted Modules and also which WG21 member didn't want C++ 0x Concepts.
WG21 went back and ripped C++ 0x Concepts back out of the standard and then spent years more working on what would eventually become C++ 11.
WG21's "Direction Group" is a handful of "experienced" people, by-invitation only, which has "been decided" (by itself of course, with a little help from Herb) to choose the future direction of C++. It further decided that to shape their work they should consult what was written in a book and in several papers about C++, all of them written by one of its members, Bjarne Stroustrup.
It reserves the right to chime in on absolutely everything, and has an "expectation" that everybody else (e.g. chairs of sub-committees) will take the Direction Group's advice.
> Concepts Lite is a consequence of ISO politics, it was either that or nothing all.
On the contrary, WG21 had voted in C++ 0x Concepts for the standard which would eventually become C++ 11 but after that Bjarne wrote a paper claiming that you don't need all these fancy features other people designed. You do, which is why C++ 20 Concepts achieves so little - but his paper was influential.
Over the next several months, the argument was made that C++ 0x shouldn't have this complicated C++ 0x Concepts feature which they had voted in because it wasn't implemented yet, and anyway Bjarne says it's not necessary. As JeanHeyd Meneide has observed it's weird, sometimes WG21 feels like it's absolutely crucial to have a working implementation, but then other times (cough modules) they don't see this as important at all and ship the standard with basically a TBD sticker. See if you can guess which WG21 member wanted Modules and also which WG21 member didn't want C++ 0x Concepts.
WG21 went back and ripped C++ 0x Concepts back out of the standard and then spent years more working on what would eventually become C++ 11.