Hal, Just in case you missed it, this is the text of what Mike said: My Prentice-Hall Dictionary of Computing says (1998, p.627): "STANDARDS. Clearly defined and agreed-upon conventions for programming intefaces. Standards may be (bullets mine) - proprietary (used only within the environment provided by a single computer vendor), - public (widely used across a variety of vendor equipment), or - formal (developed by a standards organization such as ANSI or ISO)." ==================================== Richard Conn, Principal Investigator Reuse Tapestry -----Original Message----- From: Team Ada: Ada Advocacy Issues (83 & 95) [mailto:[log in to unmask]]On Behalf Of Hal Hart Sent: Monday, July 17, 2000 4:46 PM To: [log in to unmask] Subject: Re: Standards Richard Conn wrote: > Hi, Mike, > > I'm glad you see my point about the term "standard." I don't think > it's necessary to try to distinguish unless it means something to make > the distinction. > ... RICK: I still disagree, and I read almost everyone else replying in this thread to also disagree. It now occurs to me that you are using the word "standard" where most of the rest of us would use "specification" (in the sense of a document -- altho certainly the implications of the 2 words in the Ada sense would pretty much carry the same distinction), or maybe even "definition." There may legitimately be multiple specifications for something (a PL, a function, a piece part, etc.), but hopefully only one of them gets standardized (or the standard is not exactly any one of them, but the result of a consensus process). In fact, some competition prior to establishing a standard is good, to let users try out and evaluate alternative specifications/definitions of a solution proposed to be standardized, esp. if they're supported by implementations (a mistake the DoD used to make often with its "MIL/DoD Standards"). I guess this is a lost cause, because we can't control companies who want to haphazardly stick the word "standard" on the front of their documents. The word is already severely devalued, and our usage of it isn't going to make things much better or worse than the already confusing state of affairs. "Standard" used to mean something, but now it's used so differently and inconsistently as to not be meaningful, IMO. It's a shame. -Hal