nature of standards (was RE: RESEND: Thoughts on identity attacks)

[Henry Spencer <henry@spsystems.net>]

On Thu, 14 Feb 2002, Khaja E. Ahmed wrote:
> He explains how and why 'a camel is a horse designed by committee.'  Perhaps
> we can consider things like adopting a process which mandates that there
> will always be a cleanly separated 'minimum and mandatory to implement' part
> in any standard.  Nothing gets added to it unless a compelling case is made
> for it.  Everything else is separated into optional modules etc.

As an implementor, I'd like to see the process go one step farther, with
most of those "optional modules" simply discarded as not meriting
standardization. 

I was somewhat involved with the original standardization of C.  One of
the most important decisions that committee made was that they did not
wish to see 2^5 or 2^10 different "standard C" languages... and every time
you add an "optional module" to the spec, you add another factor of 2. 
They did eventually end up having, essentially, *one* optional module --
containing all the standard libraries and certain promises about the
execution environment, not necessarily supportable in small embedded
environments -- but that was all. 

                                                          Henry Spencer
                                                       henry@spsystems.net