[COFF] Re: Commonality of 60s-80s Print Standards

On 8/17/23, segaloco <segaloco(a)protonmail.com> wrote: Here I think you have found the crux of the matter. A big difference between the ANSI standards for programming languages and the EPA regulations is the legal requirement for conformance. Nobody who uses a programming language is under any sort of legal requirement to conform to the ANSI standard--neither those who write compilers for the language, nor those who write programs in that language. The only "enforcement" of the standard that exists is consumer fraud law. If you market a compiler claiming that it is ANSI standard-compliant, and it isn't, you could be liable for civil or possibly criminal fraud/ But that's it. Very different from the EPA regulations that you cited, where failure to conform to the regulations can have very severe legal and financial consequences. Hence the lack of widespread use of the standards documents. Proper ANSI language standard compliance is important to compiler vendors who claim that their product conforms to the standard. The compiler groups I have worked in at DEC and Intel have had someone on the front end team for each language who is an expert on the fine print of the standard and whose job it is to see to it that the product (the compiler) stays standard-conformant. This person does have a complete copy of the ANSI standard on their desk. Users of compilers claiming to be standard-conformant are under no legal obligation whatsoever to write standard-conformant programs. There is thus no reason for them to have a copy of the standard readily at hand. However, every IT shop I've worked in does have their own in-house standard for programming practices, and this includes which features of the programming language are allowed to be used and sometimes how they are to be used. In a well-run programming shop, these rules are written down in detail, every programmer has a copy of them, and they are rigidly enforced--you can't check in your code if you've violated them. Failure to follow the in-house programming regulations can also have negative career advancement implications. -Paul W.