AT&T/Sun merged UNIX
Duncan C White
dcw at doc.ic.ac.uk
Thu Feb 18 07:19:41 AEST 1988
In article <632 at kuling.UUCP> martin at kuling.UUCP (Per-Erik Martin) writes:
*In article <262 at csed-47.csed-1.UUCP> roskos at 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.
*
I am reminded of Albert Einstein's famous suggestion:
Make things as simple as possible, but not simpler...
>--
>((Per-Erik Martin, Computing Science Dept., Uppsala University, )
> (Box 520, S-751 20 Uppsala, Sweden )
> (UUCP: martin at kuling.UUCP (...!{seismo,mcvax}!enea!kuling!martin)))
Duncan
----------------------------------------------------------------------------
Duncan White, | Flying is the art of aiming oneself
Dept. Of Computing, | at the ground and missing.
Imperial College, | -- Douglas Adams, So Long and Thanks
London SW7, England | for all the fish.
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