John Reagan wrote:
> 2metre wrote:
>
>>
>> Definitely wrong! Standard Pascal was defined long before the ISO
>> standard. You may wish to ignore the earlier standard, but that
>> doesn't mean it didn't exist, and is doesn't mean that other people
>> who read these messages concur with your censored version of the past.
>
>
> Well, then we'll have to just disagree then. I do not consider anything
> before ANSI/IEEE770X3.97-1983 to be a "standard". Wirth's original work
> and the 2nd edition of the J&W just give a description of the language
> with lots of ambiguities.
The definition of a standard doesn't have to be perfect to deserve to be
called a standard (cf ISO 7185:1983).
To suggest that Wirth's original standard definition doesn't qualify as
a standard is, in my opinion, just mean-spirited. Pascal was in
operation in many places before the ISO standard was published and the
people using it were working to a standard. Weren't you one of them?
> Try to read tea leaves and guess what was in Wirth's mind is an
> interesting exercise, but I would never call it a "standard".
It doesn't require reading Wirth's mind. His opinion that his definition
was the standard is written in plain English in his Nov 1972 paper. In
my opinion, as he was the creator of the language, what he wrote about
it is definitive and carries more authority than anyone else's opinion.
The only attempt I've made to guess what Wirth was thinking was my
presumption that he was uncomfortable with design by committee. From
what you know of him, is that unreasonable?
> BTW, the charter for the Pascal standards bodies (there were officially
> four, ANSI, IEEE, ISO, BSI with all the work occurring at the ANSI/IEEE
> joint meetings) ...
What happened to the BSI work that preceded these meetings? (As
described in the introduction to ISO 7185.)
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