ISO D

[bachmeier via Digitalmars-d]

On Wednesday, 17 August 2016 at 11:34:01 UTC, eugene wrote:
> On Wednesday, 17 August 2016 at 10:47:35 UTC, qznc wrote:
>> On Wednesday, 17 August 2016 at 08:02:42 UTC, eugene wrote:
>>> will ISO D be in future or not?
>>
>> What would be the benefits?
>
> unified language standard?

As a former Common Lisp user, I have to disagree rather strongly 
with that idea. IMO the worst thing for Common Lisp is the ANSI 
standard. You have several issues:

- One group argues that the CLHS is all you need. Then you're 
using a language largely defined in the late 1970's.
- There will never be an updated standard due to cost and 
impossibility of getting compromise on the original standard.
- To do anything useful - or at least modern - with the language, 
you're in the land of non-standard extensions and people telling 
you to use the standard. Any attempt to modernize the language by 
getting rid of awful names like 'princ' are quickly beaten down 
because princ is in the standard.

CL is largely a 40-year old language (not since standardization 
was complete, but since the language itself was defined) and 
there is little hope that it will be modernized. If D had a base 
of millions of developers and tens of thousands of commercial 
users, it would be different. Standardization would be at least 
as much of a disaster for D as it was for CL. Even C++, which 
mostly has users because of legacy code and a lot of money on the 
line, has found it necessary to continually update the language.