SG16 will hold a meeting *today*, Wednesday, April 9th, at 19:30 UTC
(timezone conversion
<https://www.timeanddate.com/worldclock/converter.html?iso=20250409T193000&p1=1440&p2=tz_pdt&p3=tz_mdt&p4=tz_cdt&p5=tz_edt&p6=tz_cest>).

*For those in Europe, please note that daylight savings time has begun,
so this meeting will begin one hour later relative to the last meeting.*

If you need a .ics file to import into your calendar, you can download
it here
<https://documents.isocpp.org/remote.php/dav/public-calendars/R7imgS2LJD9xfeWN/94A3D3A0-70B9-4847-935F-9453DB2BB216.ics?export>.

The agenda follows.

  * D3474R1: std::arguments
    <https://jeremy-rifkin.github.io/proposals/drafts/cpp/D3474R1.html>.
  * P3655R0: std::zstring_view <https://wg21.link/p3655r0>.

*D3474R1* comes to us courtesy of Jeremy Rifkin and seeks to provide a
modern interface to access program arguments (also known as command line
options). The design exposes the program arguments as a contiguous
sequence of elements of type std::argument via std::span. The members of
std::argument closely parallel those of std::filesystem::path and
provide conversion to char, wchar_t, char8_t, char16_t, and char32_t
representations. An additional path() member enables conversion directly
to std::filesystem::path thereby allowing the implementation to
correctly transcode a program argument to a correctly encoded file path
for the platform. Raw access to the program arguments is provided by
native(), native_string(), and c_str() members. Access to the program
options is read-only and provided by a std::arguments() function. Since
memory allocation might be required, allocator support is also provided.
The primary concern for SG16 is, of course, matters of encoding. The
encoding of program arguments, at least for POSIX platforms, usually
corresponds to the encoding corresponding to
std::text_encoding::environment() (which may differ from the current C
and C++ locales). We should discuss implementation concerns, including
any locale related ones. Given our collective expertise in how program
arguments are provided by implementations and used by programmers, we
may want to identify a list of considerations for LEWG to keep in mind
for their design review and/or suggest changes that aren't necessarily
related to core SG16 concerns.

*P3655R0* also has Jeremy's name on it, but accompanied by the familiar
names of Peter Bindels and Hana Dusíková. It seeks to standardize a
variant of std::string_view that offers a null termination guarantee.
This is not the first paper to propose such a type; nor the second, nor
the third! Given the history of papers (see section 3 in the paper) that
stalled for one reason or another, the motivation for SG16 review is to
provide a (hopefully strong) recommendation to LEWG (one way or the
other) regarding the utility of the proposed type from a group of text
experts.

Tom.