[TUHS] ANSI (C) vs IEEE (POSIX) Standards Body Selection

[Aron Insinga]

It's an issue of where the people who want a standard think they will 
have the support to create a standard using a process they are 
comfortable with.  Yes, the standards for many languages, not to mention 
the original ASCII character set, were developed under ANSI.  But look 
at JavaScript I mean ECMAScript done under the auspices of ECMA.  Sun 
started to create a Java standard under ISO/IEC but changed their mind 
and switched to their own Java Community Process.  The National 
Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) (formerly the National 
Bureau of Standards) publishes standards for some things of interest to 
the US Government -- Federal Information Processing Standards (FIPS).  
In most cases the work is done by volunteers, often with the support of 
their employers if they aren't an independent consultant or whatever.  
The accrediting organization provides the process and some 
administrative overhead.  I don't know about now, but ANSI sold copies 
of their standards to help support themselves.

And standards are used as competitive weapons by companies.  If Company 
A convinces the committee that their language features are better than 
company B's, and A's are written into the standard, then A is 
standard-compliant (with respect to those features) from the get-go, 
while B will have some work to do which may affect their customer base.  
Generally, I believe that people want to get a standard which will give 
them a programming language (& library) that they want to use, so there 
is a common goal in sight.  Traditionally standards were adopted from 
existing practice, and sometimes this can mean that the process is 
relatively quick.  (I think the original COBOL standard was taken from a 
manufacturer's language reference manual by Grace Hopper. ISOLatin-1 was 
a small change to the DEC Multinational Character Set.) Sometimes a 
committee starts reinventing things and it can take a while.  Whether or 
not it actually finds users depends on how well the committee did their 
job, and what the vendors and their customers decide.  (Dare I mention 
BASIC?)

Remember that standards also cover many other things like the SAE 
standards for bolts.

- Aron (a member of X3J16 [C++] for 2 years)


>     On Wed, Jun 26, 2024 at 12:22 PM segaloco via TUHS <tuhs at tuhs.org>
>     wrote:
>
>         Good morning, I was wondering if anyone has the scoop on the
>         rationale behind the selection of standards bodies for the
>         publication of UNIX and UNIX-adjacent standards.  C was
>         published via the ANSI route as X3.159, whereas POSIX was
>         instead published by the IEEE route as 1003.1.  Was there
>         every any consideration of C through IEEE or POSIX through
>         ANSI instead?  Is there an appreciable difference suggested by
>         the difference in publishers?  In any case, both saw
>         subsequent adoption by ISO/IEC, so the track to an
>         international standard seems to lead to the same organizations.
>
>         - Matt G.
>
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