What Standardization Will Mean For Ruby

Mirko Stocker, InfoQueue
Ruby's inventor Matz announced plans to standardize Ruby in order to"improve the compatibility between different Ruby implementations [..]and to ease Ruby's way into the Japanese government". The firstproposal for standardization will be to the Japanese IndustrialStandards Committee and in a further step to the ISO, to become aninternational standard. For now, a first draft (that weighs in at over300 pages) and official announcement are available. Alternatively,there's a wiki under development to make the standard available inHTML format.A very different approach to unite Ruby implementations is theRubySpec project -- a community driven effort to build an executablespecification. RubySpec is an offspring of the Rubinius project...[But] What do our readers think: will it be easier to introduce Rubyin their organizations if there's an ISO standard behind it?"According to RubySpec lead Brian Ford: "I think the ISO Standardizationeffort is very important for Ruby, both for the language and for thecommunity, which in my mind includes the Ruby programmers, people whouse software written in Ruby, and the increasing number of businessesbased on or using software written in Ruby. The Standardization documentand RubySpec are complementary in my view. The document places primaryimportance on describing Ruby in prose with appropriate formattingformalities. The document envisions essentially one definition of Ruby.RubySpec, in contrast, places primary importance on code that demonstratesthe behavior of Ruby. However, RubySpec also emphasizes describing Rubyin prose as an essential element of the executable specification and isthe reason we use RSpec-compatible syntax. RubySpec also attempts tocapture the behavior of the union of all Ruby implementations. Itprovides execution guards that document the specs for differences betweenimplementations. For example, not all platforms used to implement Rubysupport forking a process. So the specs have guards for whichimplementations provide that feature... This illustrates an importantdifference between the ISO Standardization document and RubySpec. TheISO document can simply state that a particular aspect of the languageis "implementation defined" and provide no further guidance. Unfortunately,implementing such a standard can be difficult, as we have seen withthe confusion caused by various browser vendors attempting to implementCSS. RubySpec attempts to squeeze the total number of unspecified Rubybehaviors to the smallest size possible..."http://www.infoq.com/news/2010/03/ruby-standardizationSee also the Ruby Standard Wiki: http://wiki.ruby-standard.org/wiki/Main_Page