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)

Sorry to disagree, but 'standards' are just 'established, commonly recognized practice'. For examples, RFCs are standards for the internet, even though they are not certified by ISO. And the 'standards bodies' are only there to put more pressure on industry, which otherwise likes to ignore the standards, because vendor lock-in increases their profit. It's mainly a political difference. And it's only a long a painstaking process if there are too many entities who have a political interest in it. (And actually, the results are not always so thrilling -- the ANSI C++ standard leaves many dark corners for, say, templates unspecified, unintentionally, and compiler implementations promptly disagree in their behaviour). I just fail to see why anything is better just because it carries some letters. But then, maybe I'm just not cowed enough by presumed authority :-)

For me, a standard is anything that I can rely on being supported by an overwhelming majority of whichever products it affects. No matter if it has ISO, ANSI, DIN, or any other letters in it :-)

If you for some reason want the table to contain just "official" standards, fine with me -- just clearly say so on the page, and make explicit how to find out if a standard is "official" or not. But I think for practical purposes, that would be the wrong approach: What is really interesting for a programming language is if one can rely on some common core constructs supported by virtually all implementations, and where to find the information which these constructs are. At least that's what would interest me when learning a new language.

Or, if you for some reason think that standards with some letters in it are "worth" more and should stand out, why not just use green/yellow/red as background? That should give people like me the information they are looking for, and keep the distinction. --Dirkt 10:31, 23 July 2008 (UTC)

It seems that you are confusing a practice with the means to enforce, codify, etc it.

As for RFC notes, they are edited and published by the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF). IETF has a defined procedure of discussing and approval the documents they publish, an organizational structure, and last but not least, it declares standardization one of its goals [see RFC 2418]. This makes IETF a standards body, and only so RFC notes standards. Implied usefulness or acceptance of RFC notes plays here no role whatsoever. --Dmitry-kazakov 17:18, 23 July 2008 (UTC)