30 Oct
2011
30 Oct
'11
2:18 p.m.
On 30 Oct 2011 at 13:19, Fred Cisin wrote:
On Sun, 30 Oct 2011, Toby Thain wrote:
It's too bad that the military doesn't exert the influence on
programming language standardization that they once did. In
particular, Grace Hopper comes to mind. By 1975, almost all RFPs we
received for COBOL-related projects had the requirement of a compiler
that could successfully run the Navy Audit test suite. COBOL prety
much started as a stadardized language in 1959 and was one of the
first to realize the plague that "vendor extensions" represented. I
believe that the 1974 spec requires that the default compilation
level be the standard with any vendor extensions disabled.
Algol-60 was another such case, however I don't believe the spec
included any I/O specifications, which probably was not a good idea.
By comparison, attempts to standardize C came long after the initial
implementations. K&R reads like a romance novel; the COBOL specs
read like the IRS code--the level of detail was enough to give you a
throbbing headache; K&R was the general description of a language
with very little detail.
--Chuck
C is standardised, so it's straightforward to
teach standard C. But
you
This must be a different meaning of standardized than I was previously
familiar with. Or perhaps it meets with George Morrow's definition of
standards, in that everyone can have a unique one of their own.