On Tue, 10 Jul 2001, Sean Russell wrote:

> On Monday 09 July 2001 04:14, you wrote:
> > My take on the matter is that an open sourced language (one where the
> > implementation of the language is available as open source software)
> > has little need for the standardization process.  The open source
>
> Hear, hear.
>
> Further, I've noticed that I don't really like any of the "standardized"
> languages, although whether that is a cause or an effect, I can't say.
> Conversely, my favorite languages haven't been standardized.  Java and Ruby
> ar examples of my current favorites, and C++ and JavaScript are examples of
> standardization gone ugly.

C++'s ugliness is due to having to be backward-compatible with C, which is
already far too broken to bother saving (and might explain why people like
it so much).

While C++ may be ugly, the standard is probably one of the coolest things
about it.  If I want to know if something is legal in C++ or if a
particular implementation is doing somehting "correctly," then I can look
it up in the standard.  If I want to know how something is supposed to
work in Ruby, well, I must ask here or on #ruby-lang, or try it in irb.
Don't get me wrong; these are nice resources, but this does slow the
development process.

I guess what I'd like to see is not necessarily a standard, but really
really thorough documentation.  The pickaxe book is good, but not
complete.  Unfortunately, such a document would probably be at least as
long as the C99 standard (about 550 pages), and someone would have to
maintain it, which is no small task.

Paul