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From: dewar@merv.cs.nyu.edu (Robert Dewar)
Subject: Re: help about handling interrupts
Date: 1998/04/07
Message-ID: <dewar.891994306@merv>#1/1
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References: <3528B9E0.6F0F@bipa162.bi.ehu.es> <3529047A.44EE08B8@cl.cam.ac.uk>
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Organization: New York University
Newsgroups: comp.lang.ada
Date: 1998-04-07T00:00:00+00:00
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Markus said

<<I'd love to comment on the POSIX.5 way of handling signals,
but the copy of POSIX.5 which I ordered from IEEE many weeks ago
still has not arrived. Standards that are only available on
paper from low-quality-of-service publishers like IEEE and ISO
are a VERY BAD THING, not at all helpful for the spread of the
technology. If you are the editor of any standard, *please* make
sure that the documents are available freely online as well as
from a big book publisher such as Springer or Addison Wesley, and not
only from buerocrats like ISO/IEEE. The AdaRM has proofed
that this is easily possible (I got my AdaRM from Springer delivered
within 3 days, at the price of a normal university textbook),
so why not also for POSIX?
>>


The easily in "easily possible" here is absurd. All the Ada achievment
shows is that it is possible, but it was FAR from easy. It took a huge
amount of work, and at one point it looked like the entire ISO
standardization process would fail because of the insistence on free
availability.

Yes it is possible, but the experience with the Ada standard is not
encouraging at all from the point of view of setting a copyable
precedent. Standards organizations are VERY insistent about obtaining
and exploiting copyrights, it is one of the major sources of funding
for these organizations.