Re: Reading a line of arbitrary length

[jsa@alexandria (Jon S Anthony)]

In article <dewar.857350120@merv> dewar@merv.cs.nyu.edu (Robert Dewar) writes:

> Jon said
> 
> There are "too many" ways to approach a language design to decree any
> as standard.  Sounds pretty silly, eh?>>
> 
> Not to anyone with any experience in language standardization. You only

Does this mean that you believe that there should not be any language
standards?  Probably not.  But that is what you are saying, even
thought that is almost certainly not what you mean.  There are indeed
a boatload of ways of doing this, but that does not mean that some
should not be selected and then refined into a "standard".  Now, your
comments here and in the previous post would seem to suggest that you
do not think this is a good idea or correct approach.


> But on anything where there is real disagreement, you can't make progress
> often, and you just have to agree that you cannot agree on a standard
> in that area.

Sure.  Absolutely agree.


> Jon, I think you would have been *quite* frustrated with the Ada 95
> effort (or any other language standardization effort for that matter).

Maybe, but I'm not so sure.  What I get frustrated about are people
who _presume_ to know everything up front about what the other party
is saying and then proceed to give all sorts of odd or strawman
interpretations of the other view as though they were fact.


> It is not good enough in such an effort to be technically correct, you
> have to be able to convince other people to gather behind one particular
> approach (hint: resorting to name calling as in "going off half cocked" is
> unlikely to succeed as a tactic -- sometimes good technical arguments
> succeed, but even there you can find yourself frustrated :-)

Oh you mean like "gratuitous rubbish" and "pet list of stuff".  Well,
of course I agree with you on this.  And yes, this sort of thing is
true in any environment where you have multiple stakeholders with
different ideas about what the "model" should be.  This is not
restricted to PL design/standards efforts.  The most typical problem
here is that the parties involved do not even know what each _means_
by the things being said.  But they _presume_ they know.  Typically
this is because the two (or more) involved have a significant overlap
of understanding, but then make the mistake of thinking their view
must surely extend to everything the other party understands.  And
thus, if that party seems to be saying something not in accord with
your internal model, then of course they are mistaken and speaking
nonsense.

/Jon
-- 
Jon Anthony
Organon Motives, Inc.
Belmont, MA 02178
617.484.3383
jsa@organon.com