From derek@knosof.uucp Tue Aug 9 14:39:16 1994 Received: from eros.Britain.EU.net by dkuug.dk with SMTP id AA13279 (5.65c8/IDA-1.4.4j for ); Tue, 9 Aug 1994 14:39:16 +0200 Received: from pyra.co.uk by eros.britain.eu.net with UUCP id ; Tue, 9 Aug 1994 13:38:16 +0100 Received: by knosof.UUCP (anilla/UUCP-Project/rel-1.0/11-05-86) id AA04659; Tue, 9 Aug 94 13:22:18 BST Date: Tue, 9 Aug 94 13:22:18 BST From: derek@knosof.uucp (Derek M Jones) Message-Id: <9408091222.AA04659@knosof.UUCP> To: wg15@pyra.co.uk Subject: Applications conformance and Modula 2 (not) X-Charset: ASCII X-Char-Esc: 29 All, >Date: Mon, 8 Aug 94 10:10:39 +1200 >From: Keith Hopper > > I remember at some time past a very impassioned plea from the UK delegation >to consider defining conformance to POSIX in a different way, involving a new >classification which, I believe, they termed rigorous. It is not a different way. It is simply a new classification to be added to the existing list. At the moment Posix only addresses the API. Companies interested in conforming applications also want the language in which the application is written to conform to standards. Rigorous Conformance is defined in terms of API and language. > This seemed quite >reasonable to me until I began to work on the M-2 binding (see WG13/D205 -- >or SC22/16?? - mislaid the number, sorry). Modula 2 has botched the whole topic of conformance. This work now seems to be driven solely by the requirements of the formal definition. Indeed it now appears to be purely an exercise in formally defining a large system with little connection to the real world. I responded to a WG13 public review with a request for a statement on applications conformance. After all Modula 2 is supposed to be the language in which one writes highly reliable, "safe" software. I was told that after a lot of discussion this concept did not fit into the current methods used to define the language. derek