From derek@knosof.uucp Wed Aug 10 14:56:02 1994 Received: from eros.Britain.EU.net by dkuug.dk with SMTP id AA15299 (5.65c8/IDA-1.4.4j for ); Wed, 10 Aug 1994 14:56:02 +0200 Received: from pyra.co.uk by eros.britain.eu.net with UUCP id ; Wed, 10 Aug 1994 13:54:24 +0100 Received: by knosof.UUCP (anilla/UUCP-Project/rel-1.0/11-05-86) id AA04831; Wed, 10 Aug 94 13:39:02 BST Date: Wed, 10 Aug 94 13:39:02 BST From: derek@knosof.uucp (Derek M Jones) Message-Id: <9408101239.AA04831@knosof.UUCP> To: wg15@pyra.co.uk Subject: What does conformance show? X-Charset: ASCII X-Char-Esc: 29 All, >Date: Wed, 10 Aug 94 09:09:34 +1200 >From: Keith Hopper > > I believe that conformance is about the ability to assign a meaning to a >program. In terms of a programming language standard the conformance of >an implementation either allows this or it doesn't. We have all seen meaningless >programs, I'm sure. > I don't see what meaning has to do with conformance. Conformance is about an application or implementation following the rules laid down in a standards document. The intent is that following such rules will result is a known set of actions happening. Because standards do not fully define everything (they specify some constructs as resulting in undefined, implementation defined or unspecified behaviours) there are various levels of conformance. At the top we have strictly conforming. Such an application does not rely on any construct whose behaviour may change. So it should give the same result on all implementations. A Conforming application only uses those constructs defined by the standard and uses some of those whose behaviour may change. Such an application may give different results on different implementations. Further on down the conformance hierarchy we have applications depending on other standards. derek