asciilifeform: but did kingdom have STANDARD!111 drop!!
asciilifeform: king pulls out microscope and still notices shortfall.
asciilifeform: 'There he ordered Yirik to pour him out a goblet of wine. "And I warn you," he said, "that you forfeit your head if you pour a drop too much or too little."'
asciilifeform: and of course loses his head, because it was quite impossible to JUST-so.
asciilifeform: as a boy, i read a - i think czech - folk tale, where a servant is made to pour JUST THE RIGHT amount of wine in the king's glass, 'too little, or too much, Off! with yer head!'
asciilifeform: but moreover, there must be, in the former case, a mechanical test which determines if he is to be shot.
asciilifeform: and standard tank shell dun fit in the luger.
asciilifeform: elaborate re where one finds 'here's the standard - it doesn't work for yout item' ??
asciilifeform: 'standard', in industrial world, has a meaning. it is a document which at least ~attempts~ an exhaustive description of an object, with an aim to enabling reader to re-create it.
asciilifeform: and alphabet of, e.g., english, is 'standard' for english in the exact 100% useless sense that mendeleev table is 'standard for mcburger'.
asciilifeform: asking to standardize a living humanlang in the nut-and-bolt sense is rather like asking for a standard liver, leg, or cock.
asciilifeform: a dead language with small literature corpus is arguably standardized.
asciilifeform: because it is difficult to measure, much less reshape, physical object without using another such
asciilifeform: attempts to WHOLLY detach a standard from particular artifacts - e.g., si def of the metre in terms of cesium atom cross-sections - have not gone far.
asciilifeform: you cannot decipher dead language using alphabet strictly.
asciilifeform: it is the closest thing any humanlang has to a standard.
asciilifeform: alphabet is not the correct analogy, dictionary - is.
asciilifeform: this unicorn, the SMALL language in which ONE CAN ACTUALLY PROGRAM, is not yet born.
asciilifeform: all known 'small' standards, e.g., ansi scheme, have resulted in ~99% of the extant code in the respective language using nonstandard libs.
asciilifeform: it has its own fucking scheduler ferfuxxsake
asciilifeform: mircea_popescu: ada has a titanic standard lib, this is not really escapable on a c machine if you want SAFE data structures, threads, etc.
asciilifeform: and the recipe whereby you substitute a dummy -- dun work.
asciilifeform: which of course barfed, because it is unable to find the motherfucking std lib that supposedly 'is optional'
asciilifeform: sooooooo then i put on gas mask, and vivisected the makefiles until FORCED bloody thing to build gnattools
asciilifeform: and they barf in non-debuggable ways because gnumake was written by chimps, and 'ERROR 2' !!!11
asciilifeform: on top of this, all but two of the gnat ver / gcc ver building it combos i've tried, barf.
asciilifeform: i found a dozen different sites with ad-hoc recipes, and patches, and NONE worked
asciilifeform: because ALL version of gcc i've been able to get a hold of, which are able to build a version of gnat i've been able to get a hold of, refuse to build gnattools (the linker) when standard lib (which dun belong on a microcontroller) is disabled.
asciilifeform: so, for instance, i have, theoretically, a gnat that builds for mips, but in actuality it dun work.
asciilifeform: it isn't even that we are operating on an animal that is squirming on the table, but that it is not an animal at all, but a bag of maggots and weevils
asciilifeform: in point of fact we do not have a freezable software stack.
asciilifeform: but, e.g., gnat, will ONLY BUILD USING ANOTHER GNAT
asciilifeform: at least it is theoretically possible to build gcc on another compiler (i personally have not attempted this, and the last confirmed report i know of is some years ago, however)
asciilifeform: in fact, it is ~impossible to build it on 2 boxes, supposing that they are not mirror images of one another's disks, and end up with same gcc.
asciilifeform: mircea_popescu: the open sores thing is a clusterfuck of a depth that i cannot even convey in words. e.g., in the past few days i have uncovered catastrophic bugs in gcc, which NO ONE will ever fix, or likely even replicate, because they ONLY show up when you try to build version X with version Y, for particular pairings of X,Y, and similar
asciilifeform: or a gnat that builds without gnat (which has been annoying asciilifeform greatly in recent times)
asciilifeform: mircea_popescu: eh we dun even have a gnudiff that build without gnudiff.
