From bill@amber.ssd.csd.harris.com Thu Mar 26 13:46:43 1992 Received: from travis.csd.harris.com by dkuug.dk via EUnet with SMTP (5.64+/8+bit/IDA-1.2.8) id AA01433; Thu, 26 Mar 92 13:46:43 +0100 Received: from amber.ssd.csd.harris.com by travis.csd.harris.com (5.61/harris-5.1) id AA20823; Thu, 26 Mar 92 07:40:59 -0500 Received: by amber.ssd.csd.harris.com (5.61/CX/UX-5.0) id AA19934; Thu, 26 Mar 92 07:40:56 -0500 Date: Thu, 26 Mar 92 07:40:56 -0500 From: bill@amber.ssd.csd.harris.com (Bill Leonard) Message-Id: <9203261240.AA19934@amber.ssd.csd.harris.com> To: JLS@liverpool.ac.uk Cc: SC22WG5@dkuug.dk In-Reply-To: Lawrie Schonfelder's message of Tue, 24 Mar 92 09:40:14 GMT <9203252323.AA05945@travis.csd.harris.com> Subject: (SC22WG5.83) Re: Procedures comment by Psmith X-Charset: ASCII X-Char-Esc: 29 > Date: Tue, 24 Mar 92 09:40:14 GMT > From: Lawrie Schonfelder > My point about the USA possibly adapting its procedures to align more > appropriately with those of ISO is that that is what most other countries > have done. Naturally! If someone offered me a chance to have a disproportionate say in something that directly affected me, I'm not fool enough to turn them down! I don't blame the other coutries for liking the ISO process, it's to their advantage to do so. > The major change between 1977 and 1990 was that during the 80's the rest of > the world became more important in the total IT market and hence ISO standards > became more important than merely national ones, even ANSI ones. Many of the > procedural difficulties that we had were a result of J3 having to try to run > two sets of conflicting procedures simultaneously. You might almost say that the rules changed in the middle of the game. Not the formal rules, mind you, but the shift in emphasis that Lawrie cites made the ISO rules more important (or at least seemingly more important) than they had been previously. > PS. The US may be the largest single nation market but it is a shrinking > proportion of the whole global market. Should we be arranging votes of ISO > by GNP, by population, by numbers of registered Fortran programmers, > by numbers of multilingual programmers, .... more fuel?(;-) How about by total monetary value of Fortran compilers licensed/sold in those coutries? What better measure could there be of the extent of use of the language? Bill Leonard Harris Computer Systems Division 2101 W. Cypress Creek Road Fort Lauderdale, FL 33309 bill@ssd.csd.harris.com --------------------------------------------------------------------------- He that does not remember the past is doomed to forget where he parked. ---------------------------------------------------------------------------