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Reports developments related to computer science in the United State as of October 1986. Definition of GKS application program written in the Ada programming language; Sponsorship of International Computer Animation Competition by National Computer Graphics Association; Invitation of National Science Foundation (NSF) for the nomination of NSF's Waterman Award.

The column "Sharing Standards" "Language-Independent Standards," published in the December 1994 issue of the journal "Communications of the ACM," made many valid points but also many that are open to question. The column first explains why organizations have tried the language-independent standards (LIS) approach, and cites Structured Query Language (SQL) as a notable success. There is no reference anywhere to graphics standards Graphical Kernel System (GKS). GKS was the real pioneer both as an LIS, and in the development of language bindings, most of which were procedural. According to authors, this entirely new binding was new to SQL. However, this is not clear from the text. Authors state the advantage most generally cited for the LIS approach is that issues of functionality can be considered separately from the detail of the various programming languages. The other case study dealt with POSIX LIS. It is correctly stated that it is probably far more difficult to produce a language-independent standard for POSIX than for SQL.