Re: Do you have Standards Committee in your language?

[Florian Weimer <fw@deneb.enyo.de>]

Just_Curious <Just_Curious@my-deja.net> writes:

> What is the role of Your Language committee?

AFAIK, there is no Language committee.  The Ada Rapporteur Group (ARG)
is probably an institution which comes close (at least in function).
It handles defect reports for the ISO Ada standard and examines future
directions of the language (for the next revision of the standard, see
http://www.ada-auth.org/).

> Does Your Committees expand horizons and enlightens compiler
> developers with their recommendations?

The compiler developers participate, of course.  After all, they're
quite familiar with the language, so their input is appreciated.

> Do you think that compiler vendors and users themselves are not
> able to maintain backward compatibility without such committees?

Wearing my Ada hat, I do not understand this question.  However, if I
put it off and try my C hat, I can understand what you mean. :-/

Ada vendors usually don't derivate from the language standard in any
significant way, that's why we have the standard. ;-)

Some vendors provide additional features, of course, some of them
are even comparable and compatible, but these extensions don't
play a major role, unlike the 'extensions' over the standard many
C implementations provide (mainly adherence to mostly unwritten
conventions).

In contrast to many other popular programming languages, there is a
publicly available test suite for Ada implementations, and compiler
vendors seek independent validation of their products against this
test suite because it's quite difficult to sell a compiler which
hasn't been validated on at least some platforms.  There's no market
for proprietary Ada dialects at the moment, which is probably a good
thing.

> And in general, do you see some analogies between Language
> Committees and other regulations in other areas of real life, on the
> net etc ?

IMHO, a group like the ARG is necessary if you have such a complex
technical specification like a programming language standard.  This is
not a question of regulation, it's a technical necessity.

> This is post in several language compiler newsgroups,

I'm answering to an article which was just posted to comp.lang.ada.