On Fri, Sep 16, 2011 at 12:21:18PM +0200, Alexander Terekhov wrote:
Dave Abrahams wrote:
FWIW 1: It's a big concern among committee members, too, and there has recently been lots of discussion about this on our reflector. Unfortunately, prices are set by ISO.
FWIW 2: We expect INCITS to start selling the standard for $30 early next year.
I never realized why some venues sold it for 1/10th of the price, as I didn't really notice the distinction between INCITS/BSI and ISO before. While $30 is a decent price point, it's still a bit bothersome as you cannot reliably point people at chapter&verse when discussing or teaching the language, instead having to paraphrase, extract a snippet or insist that the standard really says what you claim it does. Personally I'm going to buy the cheap PDF when it's available or continue using my copy of N3290, but there's a lot of people out there for which $30 has significant value (young people, developing countries, etc.).
There are very many ISO/IEC standards priced at zero, see:
http://standards.iso.org/ittf/PubliclyAvailableStandards/
What is the problem to set zero price for ISO/IEC IS 14882?
A wild guess is that they might have had much less overhead than the C++ and C standards. After all, not all standards take over a decade of work to produce with multiple meetings every year all over the world. -- Lars Viklund | zao@acc.umu.se