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language-agnosticprogramming-languagesiso

What are ISO languages?

It's in fact 3 questions :

  1. What is required for a programming language to be certified "ISO" ?
  2. What does ISO certification guarantee about the language? Does other language can be the same?
  3. A list of ISO languages?

(made community wiki - not sure about the organisation, maybe the first answer should be edited to have the full ISO languages list?)

Solution

  • I assume you are referring to programming languages, not spoken or written languages.

    ISO standardisation simply means that the language has gone through ISO's standardisation process. I don't know of any set of guidelines for programming languages in general.

    ISO doesn't guarantee anything about the language beyond the claims it makes for itself. It's just a way to canonise, in a fairly definitive sense, what the language is. Of course, there are several beneficial outcomes, such as broad support by vendors, universities, governments, etc. But these tend to just happen. They're not guaranteed in any sense.

    Also note David Thornley's comments to this answer for some insights into related standards bodies.