🚀 go-pugleaf

In article <1992Jul15.153301.5041@lotus.com>, ddavies@lotus.com 
(Derek Davies) writes: 
|> 
|>   Well, [Adobe] also created a specification for the languauge and that's
|> all you need to build the finest of interpreters, given that those who build
|> it are concerned with quality enough to make the effort required.  It may
|> very well be that Adobe, being the founder of the language *are* more
|> concerned with quality interpreters than any of the others, but this, by no
|> means, *must* be the case.

All very well, but the "specification", although remarkably good for a
commercial product, is very far from unambiguous in many places, especially
(of course) in the area of more recent additions to the language. And who
gets to decide how the ambiguities are "correctly" resolved? Why, Adobe,
of necessity. Methinks they gain a slight advantage thereby :-)

This isn't meant to be a criticism of Adobe: I see no way that they could
have avoided the situation without freezing PostScript and turning it over
to the standards organisations, which to my mind would be premature. But
don't deceive yourself into believing that manufacturers' specifications
have the lack of implementor-bias which one expects from an ANSI or ISO
standard.

Chris Thompson
Cambridge University Computing Service
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