Re: Eye opener
It used to be the case that some national standards bodies published standards "aligned with", and essentially identical to, various ISO standards, for much less money. Other posters have mentioned that BSI used to do this in the UK. In the US, for another example, you could by the ANSI 1990 C standard for (IIRC) $18, which was much cheaper than ISO 9899:1990 at the time (about an order of magnitude more expensive, I think), but they had the same content.1
So in many places, many of the more-popular ISO standards were ignored because you'd just refer to the corresponding national standard instead. Even things like section numbers were the same, so you could cite the ISO standard without actually consulting it.
Alas, that is no longer the case, at least as far as ANSI is concerned. I get the impression it's not true of BSI either.
1Of course, the C90 standard was a special case, because of the existence of Schildt's book The Annotated ANSI C Standard, which reproduced the entire standard and cost less at the time than the actual standard did from ANSI. The predominant opinion on comp.std.c was that the price difference reflected the value of Schildt's annotations, but you were free to ignore those.
Biting the hand that feeds IT
