From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 X-Spam-Checker-Version: SpamAssassin 3.4.4 (2020-01-24) on polar.synack.me X-Spam-Level: X-Spam-Status: No, score=-1.3 required=5.0 tests=BAYES_00,INVALID_MSGID autolearn=no autolearn_force=no version=3.4.4 X-Google-Language: ENGLISH,ASCII-7-bit X-Google-Thread: 103376,5997b4b7b514f689 X-Google-Attributes: gid103376,public From: jsa@alexandria (Jon S Anthony) Subject: Re: Reading a line of arbitrary length Date: 1997/03/03 Message-ID: #1/1 X-Deja-AN: 222865249 Distribution: world References: <5ds40o$rpo@fg70.rz.uni-karlsruhe.de> <33032AE2.666F@mds.lmco.com> Organization: PSI Public Usenet Link Newsgroups: comp.lang.ada Date: 1997-03-03T00:00:00+00:00 List-Id: In article 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