Jonathan Fung

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Standards

3 min read

I am interested in how Standards shape the world we live in. Growing up in a globalization-dominated culture, from media to politics to business, has told me that true agreement is only possible when based on a lowest common denominator. That is, Standards are the World, and the World is Standards.

Anushah Hossain gave a wonderful talk titled “ISCII Imperialism” at Face/Interface 2025 that explored how Unicode’s initial strategy of encoding the many scripts of the Indian Subcontinent had intrinsic flaws. The universality of Unicode resulted in these flaws realizing as group conflict and ideological clashes. Abstractly, Hossain’s case study showed how a Standard has a lasting impact on its future self and the communities it directly and indirectly prescribes.

Standards are more than just a document. They are also the governing bodies, invested parties, and users. Some examples:

  • LangDev SE: What optimizations are possible with unsequenced operators? (emphasis my own)
    • Comment by Eric Lippert:
      • Also it is important to remember that often C leaves stuff underspecified not primarily to enable optimizations, but rather to weaken the standard enough to ensure that many existing implementations of C can say that they conform! Many incompatible implementations available before the standard is written is an unfortunate consequence of early adoption.
    • Comments by Steve:
      • @EricLippert, same with ANSI SQL transaction isolation levels - Oracle was allowed to treat “snapshot isolation” as “serializable”, and the standard was intentionally weakened (and the then-current understanding of what “serializable” meant was deviated from) to allow this. It seems the function of American standards is partly to limit further variation (thereby privileging incumbent variations), rather than the traditional role to reduce (or at least codify the important distinctions of) extant variation and promote interchangeability. (1/2)
      • Another unfortunate consequence is that the gaps and ambiguities introduced into language standards often end up exploited in new ways by compiler writers for “optimisation”. This is without regard to prior de-facto behaviour of incumbent compilers, the behaviour of which the gaps were formed to accomodate. And it is without regard to whether the language actually remains tractable by the programmer under the new interpretation of the language by that compiler-maker (i.e. it is without regard to one of the main concerns of a language designer - usability). (2/2)
    • Answer by André L F S Bacci:
      • I would also echo the excellent and eloquent points of Eric Lippert and Steve on the comments of the question (and encourage them to elaborate in answers), to point out that the history of C plays a very salient role here.
      • These details are underspecified on the standard of the language, not to enable unspecified future optimizations, but to accommodate various divergent incompatible behaviours in various compilers. Where in one vendor, compiler, or particular machine, one particular optimization is culturally acceptable, desirable and even necessary, in another it was not.
      • But by the time of language standardization, these incompatibilities were not or could not be worked on, so most of these historical incompatibilities optimizations were left intentionally unspecified.

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