On Sun Aug 14, 2022 at 12:32 PM EDT, Alejandro Colomar wrote: > On 8/14/22 16:49, DJ Chase wrote: > > On Sun Aug 14, 2022 at 9:56 AM EDT, Ingo Schwarze wrote: > >> You appear to massively overrate the importance end-users > >> typically attribute to standardization. > > > > That’s probably because *I* massively overrate the importance of > > standardization (I mean I literally carry a standards binder with me). > > Still, though, it’s rather annoying that end users — especially > > programmers — don’t value standards as much. > > (Official) standardization isn't necessarily a good thing. With C, it > was originally good, in the times of ISO C89. Now, it's doing more > damage to the language and current implementations than any good (it's > still doing some good, but a lot of bad). > > [Snipped because I’m not going to quote the whole email — see previous > message for argument] > > I think it's better to let natural selection to work out its way. If a > feature is good, other implementations will pick it, and maybe even > improve it. If a feature is not good (or it's not needed by other > systems), it will not be portable. True; prescriptive standards can certainly make some things worse. As a further example, ISO 8601 sucks. I mean, its core specification is great, but there are so many different ways that are allowed that the full standard is almost completely unparseable. It also uses a slash between the start and end times of a period instead of something sensible, like, I don’t know, an en-dash! Which means that periods can be written with a slash (because that’s the standard) but also with an en-dash (because that’s how ranges work in English), but also that one can’t properly write a period in a file name or URI. Still, though, I think descriptive standards can be net-positive. The POSIX shell utilities comes to mind. Sure, they certainly have some issues, but because it’s a trailing standard, implementers are free to fix them. Do you think that a descriptive/trailing standard could be beneficial or would you still say that it could mostly hinder *roff implementations? Cheers, -- DJ Chase They, Them, Theirs
