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From: jlg@lanl.ARPA
Newsgroups: net.lang
Subject: Re: Standardization
Message-ID: <21284@lanl.ARPA>
Date: Fri, 8-Feb-85 14:57:44 EST
Article-I.D.: lanl.21284
Posted: Fri Feb  8 14:57:44 1985
Date-Received: Sun, 10-Feb-85 03:59:24 EST
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Organization: Los Alamos National Laboratory
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> I'm going to advance the thesis that sticking to Standards or attempting
> to be compatible may be a BAD thing in some cases.  There are clear
> advantages to being able to port either one's actual programs or at
> least one's knowlege about programming in a language.  However, Computer
> Science in general, and language design in particular, is nowhere near
> advanced enough for a good standard to be advanced.  There is so much
> room for advancement and improvement that locking into a standard would
> be counter-productive.

I never said anything about 'locking into' a standard.  But, in the absence
of well thought out reasons to the contrary, a standard should be your
starting point.  I'm a great supporter of standards.  It irritates me
when one fails to take hold.  Perhaps this is because I spend a lot of
time figuring out how to port code or how to write code that's easy for
others to port.  Attempting to be compatible with a standard is generally
a good idea in any case because standards committees have usually spent
enormous effort in resolving difficulties that most (even the best)
implementors may not recognize until too late.  At any rate, the favor you
do for your users by allowing them to import and export code has a value
which is difficult to estimate (but can be very large indeed).

> "If wide portability was the determining factor, we would all be using
> FORTRAN on OS/360! :-)."

Fortunately, this is just a joke.  I don't think there is enough money
on the planet to get me to work with an IBM sortware product again.  IBM
now follows the ANSI X3.9-1978 standard for Fortran anyway.

J. Giles