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From: David Brown <david.brown@hesbynett.no>
Newsgroups: comp.lang.c
Subject: Re: [OT] Standards (was Re: Simple string conversion from UCS2 to
 ISO8859-1)
Date: Wed, 26 Feb 2025 09:52:28 +0100
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On 26/02/2025 07:38, Janis Papanagnou wrote:
> On 25.02.2025 17:16, David Brown wrote:
>>> [...]
>>
>> The standard used by modems here is UCS2, not UTF-16.  As you point out,
>> this was all standardised in the early 1990's (before UTF-16) - as a
>> standardisation of things that had already been used before that.
> 
>> And
>> once a telecom standard is made, it is set in stone and never changed.
> 
> This is (or should be) true for all _standards_; that's the point
> about standards, to be a reliable base.[*]

Sure - although it is sometimes reasonable to make small corrections.

> 
> In standards ("telecom standards" or else) there's also typically
> evolutions with versioning and/or also obsoleting/deprecating older
> versions or newer versions just superseding older ones, though.
> So the property "never changed" should be read accordingly.
> 

Yes, it is often a good idea to bring out new versions of standards, 
superseding old ones but leaving the old ones available.  So while the 
SMS standards for 3G are fixed on UCS-2, perhaps the 4G or later 
standards have moved on.  (I have not checked at all.)

> (Just saying, to not get a wrong impression about the "telecom
> standards", CCITT, ITU-T,[**] specifically, and other standards.)
> 
> Janis
> 
> [*] The colloquial terminology is sometimes quite fuzzy though; e.g.
> the *.doc format was often named "de facto standard", but there was
> a long period of time neither a public document of that "standard"
> nor was it a standard in the first place; the proprietary format
> changed silently while the extension (and folks calling the format
> a "standard") stayed.
> 

In that particular example, the colloquial use of the term "standard" 
was very far from the technical term!  And even after Microsoft bribed 
and bullied their way into getting docx format ratified as an ISO 
standard, they never actually followed their own "standard" very closely 
in their own software.

But as you note in the subject line change, that is getting a bit off-topic.