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From: cdsm@sappho.doc.ic.ac.uk (Chris Moss)
Newsgroups: comp.lang.prolog
Subject: Re: More fun with WG17
Message-ID: <1359@gould.doc.ic.ac.uk>
Date: 16 Nov 89 17:22:00 GMT
References: <2609@munnari.oz.au> <696@sce.carleton.ca> <2643@munnari.oz.au> <1355@gould.doc.ic.ac.uk> <2717@munnari.oz.au>
Sender: news@doc.ic.ac.uk
Reply-To: cdsm@doc.ic.ac.uk (Chris Moss)
Organization: Logic Group, Dept. of Computing, Imperial College, London, UK.
Lines: 55

In article <2717@munnari.oz.au> ok@mudla.cs.mu.OZ.AU (Richard O'Keefe) writes:
RO>> >Now in what sense did "New Zealand" (for example) _choose_ not to be
RO>> >active in the Prolog standard?
CM>> NZ CHOSE not to participate.
>
>There is no moral agent called "NZ".

Agreed

>The only sense in which it can be said that "NZ CHOSE not to participate"
>is this:  "a group of people who control a certain bureacracy made a
>general policy decision which resulted in the fact that NZ is not
>represented on WG17, this decision was not made with reference to WG17
>as such, and the result obtained without ANY of the Prolog programmers
>actual or potential in NZ being consulted."  Put it this way, if George
>Bush went raving mad and pushed The Button, we could say in precisely
>the same sense that "the USA CHOSE to commit suicide".  This does not
>seem to be a useful way of using the word "chose".

I don't agree. It depends whether you are using "raving mad" in a
clinical sense or simply in the sense that most of us would describe anyone as
mad who pushed the button. 

In this case it seems that the New Zealand representative of ISO might well
have been entirely rational in deciding not to participate: the expense may not
be worth the payoff. 

As far as  the US  is concerned  I don't  think they  were rational.   For that
reason I was VERY glad to see Dave Bowen's note saying that ANSI  was forming a
Prolog standardization group.  Well done, Dave!

>Academics don't have to use standardised languages.  If you want to write
>your next program in a mixture of Little SmallTalk and Perl, there is nothing
>to stop you.  Standards are for engineers who are trying to build products
>or prototypes for products.  

True. There's another problem. Academics don't get PAID to write standards, nor
do they get many brownie points for it. That's why the amount of time I was
able to give was strictly limited. (maybe that was a good thing!)

Now I know you don't get paid to write a standard either, Richard! If you have
the determination of Richard Stallman to carry on then you're a lot better man
than I am (does he get a salary from MIT?) 

As I've said before, the difference between  Prolog and  (say) C  is that there
have been a number of attempts to get Prolog right,  and the  Edinburgh one was
not the first.  Thus the priority issue is far from clear.  I  didn't come from
the Edinburgh  camp  -  the  first one  I used  was Waterloo,  the second micro
Prolog.  Thus the portmanteau approach of  Common Lisp  would have  been a more
appropriate model than "do it the Edinburgh way". (It  has its  own drawbacks -
I'm not suggesting I would prefer it altogether.) The same arguments came when
the French joined, and so on. Ultimately it depends on who is in charge -
whether they are competent and good managers. That's the core of the problem.

Chris Moss.