[SystemSafety] New paper on MISRA C

[Derek M Jones]

clayton at veriloud.com,

> If we’re talking about the origination of the standard, not the organization, I’m told it began as a BT coding standard in 1994 and initially concerned with the portability (or lack thereof) aspects of C.

"Open Systems Portability Guide volume 2 C Language Portability"
published by BT in 1994.  A very nice 184 page brief (I did some
consulting work on it, so may be biased).

My copy has "Not to be shown outside BT" stamped on the front.

>  In 1997, its author, working a consultant for Programming Research, was sent a draft guideline by an auto manufacturer for review.  The guideline was deemed “somewhat behind the leading edge” and the BT standard was sent back as an alternative. Four months later that alternative was sent back for review, re-titled "MISRA C Version 0.1. MISRA C 1998”. Programming Research then customized their tool to the rules and found it could "flag over 85% of statically detectable deviations.” The rest is history, but yeah an over-generalization as well. My source for this is the original author of the BT rules, Owen Morgan (then known as David Blyth).

My point is not about where the guidelines came from, but that
the assertion "...mission of providing world-leading best practice 
guidelines..." is a major rewrite of history.

Here are some comments written soon after the first document was
published: http://www.knosof.co.uk/misracom.html
There was an active MISRA C bulleting board at the time.

-- 
Derek M. Jones           Software analysis
tel: +44 (0)1252 520667  blog:shape-of-code.coding-guidelines.com