On Sat, 21 Jul 2001, Lex Spoon wrote:
[snip]
> ANSI Smalltalk is an international standard for Smalltalk.
	               ^^^^^^^^^^^^^
[snip]

No it isn't. From http://www.ansi.org/public/about.html:

"ANSI is a private, non-profit organization (501(c)3) that administers and
coordinates the U.S. voluntary standardization and conformity assessment
system."

http://www.ansi.org/public/ansi_info/ansi_iso.html

"International Standardization 

ANSI promotes the use of U.S. standards internationally, advocates
U.S. policy and technical positions in international and regional
standards organizations, and encourages the adoption of international
standards as national standards where these meet the needs of the user
community. 

ANSI is the sole U.S. representative and dues-paying member of the two
major non-treaty international standards organizations, the International
Organization for Standardization (ISO), and, via the U.S. National
Committee (USNC), the International Electrotechnical Commission (IEC)."

While it's perfectly *fine* to use an ANSI standard worldwide, and there's
nothing stopping an ANSI standard from also being adopted by an
international standards organization, I see no evidence that the Smalltalk
one *is* an international standard (though I'd love to be shown wrong!).

Let's someone is worried that I'm jingoistic about this, let me hasten to
add that I'm just being very very pedantic :) An ISO standard would be a
*great* thing! But it's unlikely that any time soon the Smalltalk industry
would get the will and energy together to do one. If they *did* have such
will and energy, one might think it was better to expand the scope of the
current standard.

Cheers,
Bijan Parsia.

P.S. I'm given to understand that there were some tensions over Common
Lisp just being ANSI and a European standards body came up with an
alternative Lisp standard which seems to have withered on the vine.