[Mofpofjis]

The complaints about ISO Prolog, and about ISO standards generally not being available publicly / at no cost, resonate a lot with me. If you compare eg. the POSIX and the ISO C development workflows, and their respective end results, there's a world of difference.

"ISO" (International Standards Organization), where you have "national member bodies", should absolutely be a thing of the past for programming languages (or for anything related to computing). My country's national body's own homepage has a huge tirade, aiming to "dispel myths", such as the "myth" that "standards should be available free of charge". Meanwhile, lots of std orgs have published computing standards with various degrees of openness already.

ISO is a relic when it comes to computing. (So are other standards bodies that choose to remain proprietary; like those behind PCI, SCSI, ... Computing is ubiquitous and these bodies should be forced open by law, for the public interest.)

[tialaramex]

Technically ISO is not an abbreviation, their name is just shortened to ISO from the Greek word meaning equal.

The programming language standards in particular are the work of "ISO/IEC JTC 1/SC 22 Programming languages, their environments and system software interfaces" which is a sub-committee of the Joint Technical Committee between ISO and the IEC. It's sub-sub-committees all the way down.

I believe ISO processes are ill-suited to this type of work, and that on the whole those languages which still have SC22 working groups would benefit from finding a better home than ISO. The best SDO today (if you can reasonably call the IETF an "organisation" which it says it is not) is the IETF but the IETF doesn't want anything to do with programming languages, so, maybe they could find a home at ECMA where Javascript lives or they could go build their own SDO for purpose.

[Mofpofjis]

> they could find a home at ECMA where Javascript lives or they could go build their own SDO for purpose

One option is https://www.oasis-open.org/

[pjmlp]

POSIX is hardly much more open than ISO, it also has its issues, and contributing to OpenGroup is hardly like doing a pull request.

So is Khronos also a relic? After all if the standards are made available, the contributions are "you have to be this tall to play" kind of entry.

I do agree that ISO should improve itself to modern times, though.

[kazinator]

The Open Group hosts hosts a searchable, hyper-linked form of the specification.

Here is the 2024 update:

https://pubs.opengroup.org/onlinepubs/9799919799/

If you go to the Main Index there is a link to a Downloads page where you can get a tarball of this stuff in some shape or form for local use.

Vast difference between this and the paywalls put up by ISO and their member organizations, and their free PDFs that have only tables of contents.

[pjmlp]

Now try to contribute to OpenGroup.

You mean free pdfs like C and C++ drafts?

https://www.open-std.org/jtc1/sc22/wg14/www/docs/n3220.pdf

https://isocpp.org/files/papers/N4860.pdf

Maybe like Ada,

http://ada-auth.org/standards/ada2y.html

Or Fortran,

https://j3-fortran.org/doc/year/23/23-007r1.pdf

Apparently there is a little more than a table of contents, when people actually know where to look.

[Mofpofjis]

> Now try to contribute to OpenGroup.

Funnily enough, I had ended up contributing to POSIX without trying to. I just participated in mailing list discussions and in the public bug tracker (reporting issues, commenting on tickets etc), for which I only needed to register a no-strings-attached account -- the absolute minimum for participating in any bug tracker. Unexpectedly, I got named in the "Participants" section of the standard. My head is still spinning.

Here are some links for you:

- SUSv2: https://pubs.opengroup.org/onlinepubs/007908775/idx/index.ht...

- SUSv3, 2004 Edition: https://pubs.opengroup.org/onlinepubs/000095399/nfindex.html

- SUSv4, 2024 Edition: https://pubs.opengroup.org/onlinepubs/9799919799/

You can find links to earlier editions of SUSv3 and SUSv4 here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Single_UNIX_Specification#Exte...

Austin CSRG landing page: https://www.opengroup.org/austin/

Join the group: https://www.opengroup.org/austin/lists.html

Bug tracker: https://austingroupbugs.net/view_all_bug_page.php

I don't know where the SUSv1 PDFs are, I have local copies; but in 2025, they're at best of historical interest.

[kazinator]

It shouldn't be easy to contribute to POSIX. That shit needs some serious gatekeeping. It's not a side-project whose goal is self-actualization for all participants. The requirements get foisted on everyone and last decades.

[Mofpofjis]

I agree with you about the seriousness and heft of POSIX (and I definitely know your name from comp.lang.c[.moderated], so I respect your opinion); however, there is no arbitrary gate-keeping around POSIX. If anyone is willing to put in the time and effort, they're welcome to join. This couldn't be more different from other standards orgs where you can only join as a (voting, or observing) representative of an employer that pays an exorbitant yearly membership fee.

[TheAceOfHearts]

Maybe someday someone will find the courage to do a full dump of every ISO standard into LibGen or SciHub.

[convolvatron]

doesn’t have to be a legal enforcement if vendors just don’t work with bodies that insist on this counterproductive notion of standards as a profit center.

unfortunately i think there us some degree of collusion here. it’s easier to get your existing proprietary standards ratified if there are fewer players in the room and the palms that need to be greased are clearly marked

[OneDeuxTriSeiGo]

It's not exactly clear cut. Standards are unfortunately in general quite expensive to produce and maintain.

Software oriented standards are certainly cheaper than metallurgy, machining, manufacturing, building construction, environmental, health & safety, and the other big classes of standards however they still have quite a cost.

Historically the ISO standards development process for software standards (like the C or C++ standards) happened only in small part asynchronously and historically required large, extended-duration committee meetings where all the details were hashed out in person. This process only really started to change during COVID but even then it's still a very in-person synch-heavy process and that's not exactly cheap to run.

And with most standards, the FDIS (final draft international standard) revisions are made public. They can be found online even if they can be annoying to dig up. For 99% of cases the FDIS revision is more than sufficient and is identical to the published standard minus a typo or grammar mistake here and there.

As the average SW dev or engineer of course you don't need to fork over the cost for the published standard but any large company will probably purchase a catalog of standards rather than deal with the overhead of dealing with FDIS (and any legal risk from not following the "true" standard).

It is also worth noting that pretty much every university library (and many public non-university libraries) has some contract or service that provides access to copies of the standard to members free of cost.

[Mofpofjis]

Evidence to the contrary (anecdotal, admittedly):

- https://github.com/EbookFoundation/free-programming-books/is... -- "The most recent freely available draft of C17/C18 used to be c17_updated_proposed_fdis.pdf, but it's no longer available directly and you need to use Wayback Machine to download it."

- I used to work for a multinational software company whose bread-and-butter was C. The company had indeed purchased a catalog of standards, but that catalog didn't include ISO C. When I formally proposed just that, they rejected it (and kind of made me feel uncomfortable about my proposal, to boot).

[convolvatron]

I used to work in standards. my organization supported my salary, my travel, and paid membership fees. yes, the standards body did rent the hotel ballroom, and run a website. but otherwise the task of making the sausage was all volunteer.

[fanf2]

Yeah

For the horrible tedious details, see the “Policy for the distribution of ISO publications and the protection of ISO’s copyright” aka ISO POCOSA 2012.

https://archive.org/details/iso-pocosa

[unixhero]

Scsi was great

[sevensor]

It really was.