[Gllug] open source centric ICT in Schools from Sept 2012 ?

[Nix]

On 13 Jan 2012, Philip Hands uttered the following:
> Well, yes, except that OOXML's supposedly an open standard, if you ask
> the BSA or ISO (as we both know to our cost ;-)
>
> Not that anyone's actually bothered to implement that standard even
> once, so as long as there are at least two properly independent
> implementations, at least one of which was from the documentation,

Of course, this very rarely happens :/ you might as well call C++
"supposedly an open standard" since as far as I know it has had one
single complete implementation, by the EDG folks, and that was years
after C++98 was finalized -- and what was implemented was not actually
C++98 but C++98 with numerous fixes found during the implementation
process.

And it was so agonizing, for such small benefit, that I don't think
anyone else has ever bothered.

However, there is a difference of degree. Unlike OOXML, *most* of C++
was standardized from existing implementations, and there was generally
an attempt to ensure that things were implemented and useful before
standardization -- it was the bits that weren't implemented first, and
that were standardized in a bit of a last-minute rush, that turned out
to be nearly-unimplementable and largely useless horrors. (I'm thinking
of template export here.)

This appears to describe the *whole* of OOXML.

-- 
NULL && (void)
--
Gllug mailing list  -  Gllug at gllug.org.uk
http://lists.gllug.org.uk/mailman/listinfo/gllug