The other problem with standards is they are painfully slow to adapt to new situations. You could almost say that language restrictions are 'standards' in that sense - it's a standard that in BMax there is no way to define your own conditional compilation.
That's what's nice about Lisp. You just redefine your own little localized piece of the language with a macro and you've just added your own standard (i.e: new localized syntax for defining binary classes) - but because it's a feature of the language itself it can compile on any standard Lisp compiler.
There is a time and a place for standards (like your reference to the IP specification), but that doesn't trickle down to all levels of coding.
More or less, I'm in complete agreement with Noel's post above.
That's what's nice about Lisp. You just redefine your own little localized piece of the language with a macro and you've just added your own standard (i.e: new localized syntax for defining binary classes) - but because it's a feature of the language itself it can compile on any standard Lisp compiler.
There is a time and a place for standards (like your reference to the IP specification), but that doesn't trickle down to all levels of coding.
More or less, I'm in complete agreement with Noel's post above.