Path: utzoo!utgpu!water!watmath!clyde!rutgers!sri-unix!quintus!sun!pitstop!sundc!seismo!uunet!mcvax!enea!kuling!martin
From: martin@kuling.UUCP (Erik Martin)
Newsgroups: comp.unix.wizards
Subject: Re: AT&T/Sun merged UNIX
Message-ID: <632@kuling.UUCP>
Date: 9 Feb 88 17:42:33 GMT
References: <11558@brl-adm.ARPA> <262@csed-47.csed-1.UUCP>
Reply-To: martin@kuling.UUCP (Per-Erik Martin)
Organization: Dept. of Computer Systems, Uppsala University, Sweden
Lines: 18

In article <262@csed-47.csed-1.UUCP> roskos@csed-1.UUCP (Eric Roskos) writes:
>
>One thing to realize is that a standard that is too large and complex is
>not likely to be accepted.  If standards are to tell people how to build
>something (rather than just telling them to accept some existing product
>as the standard), they have to be simple enough for people to be able
>to build things to meet the standard.
>

On the other hand, too small a standard is not accepted as is.
People start to ship standard products with non-standard extensions
so we end up with a multitude of almost compatible implementations.
A standard must be *large* enough to be accepted as it is.

-- 
((Per-Erik Martin, Computing Science Dept., Uppsala University,    )
 (Box 520, S-751 20 Uppsala, Sweden                                )
 (UUCP: martin@kuling.UUCP  (...!{seismo,mcvax}!enea!kuling!martin)))