Talk:Language Comparison Table

Is Haskell standardized by some standards body, ISO, IEC etc? (Language report certainly does not qualify as a standard. All languages have reports, since Algol 68 times...) --Dmitry-kazakov 17:48, 22 July 2008 (UTC)

No, it isn't, but the Haskell 98 Report is the standard definition for the language -- all compilers support it, and all compilers have switches to distinguish between Haskell 98 and their own extensions. Like all C compilers support ANSI C. Compare to, say, OCaml, where the current INRIA implementation of the compiler is the standard :-) Or Lisp, or Smalltalk, with their plethora of different implementations. And since it is one of the design goals of Haskell to have the language completely formally specified, I guess one should mention it somewhere.

Is there any reason to distinguish between standards enforced by "official" standard bodies, and those enforced by, hm, "community standard bodies"? --Dirkt 08:14, 23 July 2008 (UTC)

Yes. Standards bodies are here to standardize. So it is up to them to decide what is a standard - an officially published document, which title starts with "ISO" followed by a decimal number... (:-)). Established, commonly recognized practice is not a standard. Neither a formal language specification is. One can formally specify very different languages. However, these two are probably premises for some standards body to start the process of standardization.

A user community cannot serve as a standards body for the same reason why language preferences cannot do as a language definition. But a community can organize itself in order to bring a new standard to some standard body. AFAIK, for example, ISO actually does not design the standards, it only approves ones designed by some groups of interests, communities. It is a long and painstaking process (which does not necessarily makes the programming language better). So it is unfair to call other things "standards." --Dmitry-kazakov 09:09, 23 July 2008 (UTC)