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Being mostly interested in the ISO C and C++ standards, I wonder why programming language standards for ISO/IEC 23270:2006 C# and ISO/IEC 16262:2011 ECMAScript are publicly available from the ISO website, whereas standards for C and C++, and possibly other languages are not. What is the rationale behind the decisions to make these certain programming language standards publicly available, but not standards for other programming languages?

PS: The question on ISO/IEC Website and Charging for C and C++ Standards touches the issue about why the C/C++ standards are charged for, but the answers do not explain, why these other standards are not charged for.

jotik
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  • I'm not surprised by closed source implementation of open standards (like OpenGL), but C and C++ have this backwards: the standard is closed and there's a ton of open source implementations. – Kos Jun 30 '17 at 09:37
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    They are not free (in practice they can be found easily) but they are publicly available. – Stargateur Jun 30 '17 at 09:38
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    Related Question : https://stackoverflow.com/questions/16917453/why-is-there-no-iso-or-ecma-standardization-for-c-sharp-later-than-2-0 – msc Jun 30 '17 at 10:12
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    Some languages have a corporate sponsor paying all the costs for producing a standard. Most of the others do not. – Bo Persson Jun 30 '17 at 10:15

2 Answers2

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Because, as described here and here, the C# and ECMAScript standards were developed by ECMA and later adopted by ISO. ECMA, which is a consortium of companies, makes its standards freely available; ISO, which is an aggregation of public entities, does not. In the case of C# and ECMAScript the original policy wins.

Nicola Musatti
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The linked-to page says:

The following standards are made freely available for standardization purposes.

So, I guess that's their reasoning, but it's not very deep of course. For some reason those particular standards listed seem to have been considered more important to have freely available so that various parties can use them to standardize.

The selection is not obvious.

unwind
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    If some standards are made freely available _for standardization purposes_, doesn't that mean the standards that _aren't_ made freely available are created for something _other_ than standardization purposes? – TripeHound Jun 30 '17 at 10:56