print statement and multithreading

[William B. Clodius]

Paul Duffin wrote:
> 
> Tim Peters wrote:
> >
> > [Tim]
> > >> [ANSI/ISO] rely on income from selling hardcopy.
> >
> > [Paul Duffin]
> > > Sounds very daft to me.
> >
> > Not really.  It takes about a decade to produce an ISO/ANSI language std,
> > and person-centuries of work.  They need money!  Unsure about ISO, but ANSI
> > gets about 60% of its revenue from selling stds.
> >
> 
> I understand that they need money in order to do the job and I appreciate
> that their job is very important, I am just questioning whether selling
> copies of standards is the best way to finance it. Standards should be
> available to everyone but charging for them limits the audience and hence
> limits the effectiveness. I have no idea how much a digital copy of the
> standards cost but I do wonder whether it has limited the take up of the
> standard. There are also bound to be all sorts of legal copyright issues
> which further complicates their use.
> <snip>

Not all potential users of a standard are interested in its initial
developement, a C90 compiler vendor may not want (may not afford) to put
in any effort into developing a C99 standard, but he may be interested
in developing a C99 compiler once the standard appears, provided it
develops sufficient market interest. The users who are interested in
developing a standard resent subsidizing the other potential users, by
financing all the development costs, and cannot be certain that a
standard will finally appear in a usefull form, so that development
tends to be price sensitive and in practice not all development costs
are paid by the interested parties. Therefore the develpement and
approval (and to a small extent the distribution) of a standard often
requires additional financing.

There are basically two options: financing by every one (government
subsidy) or financing by the user community. Financing of non-military
standards by the government has generally been unreliable: will the US
fund something that will benefit Japan, should taxing accountants be
used to subsdidize something that is used only in nuclear power plants?
The user community generally breaks up into two communities: providers
(vendors) and customers (buyers). Providers are always very concerned
about the details of compatibility with the standard, for many standards
customers are also very concerned about the details of compatibility.
I.e., the builder of a nuclear power plant, a chemical factory, airport,
or computer has to worry in detail about the implications of standards
conformance. As a result users of most standards tend to be very
insensitive to its price. Its price will be almost negligible to the
cost of ensuring conformance. Standards authorities generally set their
prices accordingly, high.

Popular programming languages tend to be unusual in that they have a
particularly large number of customers who tend to be less concerned
about the details of compatibility. Therefore the market for such
standards is probably much more price sensitive than the market for
other standards. To test out this theory recent programming language
standards, i.e., C++ and C99, are available from the standards bodies in
electronic form at reduced rates, i.e., less than $20.