standardization ISO

Jonathan M Davis jmdavisProg at gmx.com
Fri Nov 19 22:43:58 PST 2010


On Friday 19 November 2010 15:29:15 bioinfornatics wrote:
> hi, why D language doesn't have  a standardization (like iso)?
> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/International_Organization_for_Standardization

It takes years to reach that point. While the specification for D2 is now fairly 
stable, changes are still being made. You would have to have a very stable spec 
before trying to make it an international standard. And honestly, while it's 
nice to have an international standard, I'm not sure that it does all that much 
for you. Most languages - including many major ones - have no international 
standard. For instance, Java, python, and ruby don't have an ISO standard, and 
yet they're heavily used. Take a look here, and you'll see that very few 
languages have ISO standards: 
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_programming_languages

Really. I'm not sure that it's all that useful to have them in many cases - 
especially when you have a central place where the language is defined. Many 
languages are designed by one person or group and have specific language 
versions, so you have a specification that tools can use or which other groups 
can implement. It's generally a sign of maturity for a language when it gets an 
ISO standard, but the lack of one doesn't necessarily say anything bad about a 
language. D may very well get an ISO standard some day, but it doesn't need one, 
and I don't think that it would really be benefited by one at this point. It's 
going to have to be a lot more mature before that's likely a good idea.

- Jonathan M Davis


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