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From: dwp@willett.pgh.pa.us (Doug Philips)
Newsgroups: comp.lang.forth
Subject: Re: Off BASIS
Message-ID: <1636.UUL1.3#5129@willett.pgh.pa.us>
Date: 29 Aug 90 04:02:07 GMT
References: <9008271927.AA29643@ucbvax.Berkeley.EDU>
Organization: String, Scotch tape, and Paperclips.  (in Pgh, PA)
Lines: 36

In <9008271927.AA29643@ucbvax.Berkeley.EDU>, JAJZ801@CALSTATE.BITNET ("Jeff Sicherman,CSU Long Beach") writes:
> 
>   It would seem, from the recent postings about the distribution policy
> for BASIS13 that the committee is trying to inhibit, not prevent, the
> wide dispersal of the proposed standard. It would probably be 'illegal'
> to prevent it, given their mandate, but making it slower, harder, and
> at some expense to get when an efficient medium is available is sort
> of a logistic stonewalling. Restricting it to MS Word format makes it
> minimally portable. Convertible standard formats, especially Postscript (tm)
> which I suggested before are available and presumably verifiable.

Just to say it ONE MORE TIME:  X3J14 is the FIRST TC to have ANY KIND
of online document available.  You can flame, but flame ANS for failing
to do this before.  Maybe we can get a semi-official reply from the TC
about the why's and what's and wherefore's of getting this to come about.
When the C standard (X3J11) was winding down there was some net traffic
about on-line access.  As I recall there were moral and legal sides to the
question.  I no longer recall the justifications for restricting, except
that selling hardcopy is how ANS makes its money.

The TC should be applauded for forcing this issue.  BUT, be forewarned,
there is NO guarantee that when the BASIS becomes a dpANS that ANS will
let the TC distribute it (the dpANS) electronicly.

> become proficient and comfortable with it. Let's face it: it's unnatural
> from an English language point-of-view and that's what's been burned into
> our neural nets in this country.

Oh, and so is assembler and C and ADA and SmallTalk (can you really THINK
in an OO manner when programming?), and LISP and ... 

-Doug

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