[Mono-list] class-status and ECMA-status

[Jonathan Stowe]

On Thu, 4 Apr 2002, Gopal.V wrote:

> That's a bad attitude if I ever saw one . Are you hinting that ECMA is
> under the control of Microsoft !. And mono is going to ignore ECMA and
> support Microsoft's violations . Ye Gods , what more should I hear ?.
>

I think you will find that ECMA is considered as somewhat of a 'flag of
convenience' by software vendors, after all Javascript also was given an
ECMA certification being totally an invention of Netscape.  This is not
particularly a complaint against ECMA but I think you will find that the
barrier is considerably lower than ANSI for getting certification for a
particular software standard.  The C language for instance was almost ten
years in becoming ANSI certified (and there are still non-compliant
implementations).

Without knowing the full history of this I would suggest that it was
Microsoft who provided the full specification to ECMA in the first place
and asked for it to be certified, please correct me if I am wrong, ECMA
checked the specification to ensure that it was complete enough for
someone to implement it from scratch and granted the certification and
published it.

However, it is has to be said that there is no reference implementation
other than that provided by Microsoft (both in the .Net SDK and in Rotor)
and it would be a foolish software developer (IMO) that would ignore the
way that the actual implementations operated.

I'm all for standards myself and I would hope that mono will converge with
the full ECMA specification, but I think in this stage of development
pragmatism should be the key and I think that the ability to run code
produced by the Microsoft tools should be the priotity.

Anyhow, enough of this, let's go back to making this software the best
available.

/J\
-- 
Jonathan Stowe                      |
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