4 ms·

Rather tangential, and someone correct me if I'm wrong... I'm genuinely open to changing my views on this. You know what's fucked up? To the best of the knowle

Rather tangential, and someone correct me if I'm wrong... I'm genuinely open to changing my views on this. You know what's fucked up? To the best of the knowledge you can't get the official IEEE 754 spec without paying a decent amount of money. Why do we support the IEEE when pulling this kind of crap? Tons of standards are open! Like WHATWG, W3C, and IETF. Am I unreasonable for expecting standards documents to be free and open? I'm not an implementer, but being able to reference the spec is incredibly valuable in identifying what kind of behavior I can reasonably expect when developing something. If I'm researching something in a professional setting I can get my job to pay for it, but I don't really wanna pay for specs when I'm just poking around for fun. Having a paywall behind specs also makes them nigh inaccessible for people from less privileged countries. There's no way a kid from, say, India or Latin America would be able to afford tons of these specs. I'm certainly not an expert on the subject, but couldn't someone create an open "fork" of the IEEE 754 spec and have people refer to that instead?

deleted 8y ago
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pjmlp 8y ago
You also cannot get any ISO standard without paying, including C and C++. Yes the draft versions are available, but you cannot be 100% sure that the final one isn't changed.
- andrewaylett 8y ago
  TBH I suspect in any given case, the differences between the last draft and the final text are smaller than those between the final text and reality. Especially since the implementers were probably working from the draft. I actually think it's quite an ingenious mechanism for making money from the people who have it while not hindering the people who don't.
- tannhaeuser 8y ago
  ISO/IEC lists their publicly available standards at the address below. [1]: http://standards.iso.org/ittf/PubliclyAvailableStandards/ http://standards.iso.org/ittf/PubliclyAvailableStandards/
userbinator 8y ago
but I don't really wanna pay for specs when I'm just poking around for fun. Then you don't, and just search the Internet harder. ;-) Having a paywall behind specs also makes them nigh inaccessible for people from less privileged countries. There's no way a kid from, say, India or Latin America would be able to afford tons of these specs. They all use SciHub, LibgeN, and the like.
andrepd 8y ago
There's sci-hub and libgen, precisely for people like you. Hobbyists who would/could never in a million years buy the standards.

deleted 8y ago

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pjmlp 8y ago

You also cannot get any ISO standard without paying, including C and C++. Yes the draft versions are available, but you cannot be 100% sure that the final one isn't changed.

andrewaylett 8y ago
TBH I suspect in any given case, the differences between the last draft and the final text are smaller than those between the final text and reality. Especially since the implementers were probably working from the draft. I actually think it's quite an ingenious mechanism for making money from the people who have it while not hindering the people who don't.
tannhaeuser 8y ago
ISO/IEC lists their publicly available standards at the address below. [1]: http://standards.iso.org/ittf/PubliclyAvailableStandards/ http://standards.iso.org/ittf/PubliclyAvailableStandards/

userbinator 8y ago

but I don't really wanna pay for specs when I'm just poking around for fun. Then you don't, and just search the Internet harder. ;-) Having a paywall behind specs also makes them nigh inaccessible for people from less privileged countries. There's no way a kid from, say, India or Latin America would be able to afford tons of these specs. They all use SciHub, LibgeN, and the like.

andrepd 8y ago

There's sci-hub and libgen, precisely for people like you. Hobbyists who would/could never in a million years buy the standards.