Fergus Henderson writes:
ISO is the same. But standards don't get updated every five years.
Rather, each standard must be _reconsidered_ every five years. One of
the possible results is for the standard to be reapproved unchanged.
If the standards committee does decide that the standard should be
changed, then it will start a new project to produce a revised version
of the standard. This process itself takes years. So typically
language standards get updated less than once every ten years.
Fortran: 66, 77, 90.
COBOL: 74, 85
Ada: 83, 95.
C: 89, 9X.
(Original standard in '89, currently undergoing revision;
revised standard, tentatively titled "C9X" due in 99, but
might not happen until 2000 or later.)
True. Others have a greater velocity of change, particularly if they
are newer; VHDL, for example.
However, standards committees can publish normative amendements
in the intervening periods. For example, there have been some
normative amendments to the C standard since 89 (relating to
internationalization and numerical extensions).
There are actually several options here. A "normative amendment" is
essentially (in IEEE land) the same as a reballot; it just doesn't
require the document to be reprinted. The VHDL committee produced a
"sense of the working group" report that, while not officially
normative, gave the resolution to several ambiguities and the like.
This is not _necessarily_ true. For example, the ISO Ada 95 standard
is freely available on the net.
It all depends on who gets the money. In this case, the AJPO *paid*
for the free availability.
However, convincing ISO of this would be a significant hurdle to
overcome.
Agreed; perhaps impossible.
In any case, I agree with Dave Barton that ISO standardization for
Haskell should not be considered until after the current effort
at defining "Standard Haskell" is complete.
Even if then.
Dave Barton <*>
[EMAIL PROTECTED] )0(
http://www.intermetrics.com/~dlb
