The new ACM top4, elected Thursday April 1st,  surprised the executive board today by announcing that no ACM project will be allowed into EOH unless it meets new, strict guidelines for portability and cleanliness.
     The Banks of the Boneyard spoke with a representative of the newly elected ACM top4 to get an idea of the new quality standards.  "ACM's code is a mess," said the rep.  "We need consistent coding style or tech companies are just not going to see this as a professional organization." 
     The first requirement laid down is that curly braces go on the "same damn line" as the opening statement or function definition.  "Explicit brace matching is for sissies.  Besides, your editor highlights it for you," was the official stance on the highly sensitive curly brace issue.  In addition to the newly enforced curly brace position standard, the new ACM top4 wants to ensure consistent indentation across all ACM code.  During the announcement, the new chair was heard to comment: "Screen real estate is tight.  Two space indentations, maximum.  And for Christ's sake people, use spaces, not tabs!"
     Widely regarded as the most bizarre was the new requirement that all ACM C code fall within the ISO 646-1083 Invariant Code Set, which does not include the characters [, ], {, }, \, ^, #, |, or ~, described as "sketchy" and "unreliable" by the new ACM leadership.  The new chair had this to say:   "ISO 646-1083 exists for a reason.  We can't rely on everyone having ASCII-compatible terminals!  For all you know, your array index syntax could be showing up as parentheses on your coworkers terminal."  The solution is, for ANSI-compliant preprocessors, to replace [ and ] with ??( and ??), { and } with ??< and ??>, \ with ??/, ^ with ??', # with ??=, | with ??!, and ~ with ??-.  "It's just a simple search and replace," said the new chair.  "I don't see what the big deal is."
     The new leadership has promised that ACM administrator Chris Clausen will go through the CVS repositories in a weeks time to fix people's code unless the SIG leaders can demonstrate that they have conformed.  The top4 representative commented that SIGs "do not want that to happen."