Date: Mon, 24 Jun 1996 13:27:36 -0700 (MST) From: Terry Lambert <terry@lambert.org> To: msmith@atrad.adelaide.edu.au (Michael Smith) Cc: terry@lambert.org, msmith@atrad.adelaide.edu.au, plm@xs4all.nl, freebsd-current@FreeBSD.ORG Subject: Re: tcl -- what's going on here. Message-ID: <199606242027.NAA28865@phaeton.artisoft.com> In-Reply-To: <199606240848.SAA21511@genesis.atrad.adelaide.edu.au> from "Michael Smith" at Jun 24, 96 06:18:00 pm
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> Terry Lambert stands accused of saying: > > > > > > Is 'bc' used by anything else, for example? Yet it's a useful thing to > > > have. So is perl, so is Tcl, so are a number of other things. > > > > I thought the justification for bs was the same as the justification > > for sh: POSIX 1003.2. > > ... so we should aspire to minimal conformance to a standard which embraces > a consistent level of mediocrity? > > ... or is conformance to the standard meant to be a guarantee that the simple > things will work as expected, so that stress can be spent on things more > rewarding? A standard is a bar. Increasing standardization raises the bar. If you expect OS conformance with a standard when you code for the OS, it raises the baseline for what you can expect to be implemented consistently fom system to system. So OS's should always exceed conformance requirements and applications should always expect only minimal compliance. When enough OS's exceed requirements in the same way, you can change the standard, and the applcation writers can move up their baseline. The big success of Win32 is that it isn't very multiplatform, so you can code right to the line without a lot of wasted effort. You can also have a defacto conformance, which drastically raises the baseline. This is why Windows is so popular, and why it's so hard to emulate: there are a lot of things that are assumed to be below the baseline that realy don't belong there in a coherent design. Terry Lambert terry@lambert.org --- Any opinions in this posting are my own and not those of my present or previous employers.
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