Questions tagged [standards]
Standards are rules and customs that the software industry considers to be important and are codified in some way, either as a formal specification like an ISO standard or a language specification or as a more informal document like rules for behavior at a workplace.
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JSON: RFC8259 Escape forward slash or not?
It seems that the RFC8259 and ECMA-404 definitions of JSON are unclear on the escaping of solidus, aka forward slash.
RFC8259 states:
Any character may be escaped.
All Unicode characters may be ...
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How to decide when to increase the minimum supported C++ standard version?
I'm maintaining a library written in C++, which offers modern-C++ bindings for another API that's C-ish (it's this one, although I'm trying to make this question somewhat more general).
Now, when I ...
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The meaning of "function blocks of limited size of coding" in ISO 13849-1
Section 4.6.3 of ISO 13849-1 concerning "safety-related application software" has following provisions:
c) Software design shall feature:
semi-formal methods to describe data and control ...
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Regrouping several application files into one
I am working on a C++ application which lets users work on projects.
Each project consists of several files that should not be known / edited manually by the user.
For that we currently use a folder ...
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How did the IEEE 754 standard choose how many bits to allocate to each field (i.e. sign, exponent, mantissa)?
I've been reading about the IEEE 754 standard, but can't understand how or why they chose those exact number of bits for the exponent and mantissa. For example, why 8 bits for the exponent and not 7 ...
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Is there a standard for describing information about Java Beans (Bean Introspections)
In many situations we need access to meta information about Java Beans. The Java Reflection API itsself does not work for projects were performance matters so the bigger Frameworks like Spring or ...
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Handling resource not found
I have an endpoint GET home/{homeId}/laptops . Its response is :
{"homeId":string,"laptops":string[]}
If homeID does not exist I can return '404 Not found' OR an empty response ...
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Why follow standards of a voluntary organization?
I'm struggling to understand how, for example, the IETF is a "standards organization" but the standards are "voluntary" meaning there is no civil or criminal penalties for not ...
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Is a good practice using form tag's atributes in HTML?
Checkout this HTML using the attribute action, method and target from <form></form> tag:
<form action="/action_page.php" method="get" target="_blank">
...
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Why is there no web standards for charts? [closed]
Charts are a pretty common thing on the Internet. So that made me wonder why there are still not some web standards for the charts?
I thought that it would be cool if we had some sort of built-in ...
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What is the role of ISO in the ECMAScript standardization process?
I've been told on StackOverflow this questions was off-topic so I'm asking here:
From this webpage (ISO/IEC 22275:2018):
This International Standard defines the ECMAScript Specification Suite ...
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What can be an Actor in a subsystem sequence diagram?
I am doing a lot of sequence diagrams. We decided to start at a subsystem level of abstraction because we do not have all the details yet. In my diagrams I was using this definition of Actor:
In UML, ...
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Document containing relevant data in meta-data
I find myself working with documents that need to be displayed to a user and at the same time, I need the information that they bear.
For example, you have a generated PDF document (or other "...
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How to reflect "functional quality" when implementing ISO 250XX, which is quality model of non-functional requirements?
We want to adopt ISO 25000 quality model, which explicitly states it does not deal with functional requirements (i.e. its Functional suitability is truly about assessing how the functions fit in the ...
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How different are float numbers across different hardwares?
Firstly i am aware that different hardware architectures handle floats differently, so I can't guarantee the same result on different machines even with the same inputs.
But in my case i do not have a ...
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Any standard expansions to RFC 4122 for generating a name based UUID using SHA256
I am doing some code review for a project and they have generated a name based UUID using SHA256 as the hashing algorithm.
I found a some Java code that created a Name-based (hashing) UUIDs using SHA-...
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Whatever happened to HTTP SEARCH? [closed]
It seems 5 years ago there was a proposal for a HTTP SEARCH request, but it does not appear to have been adopted and it not widely supported. Are there any factual documents or citations which shed ...
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Are all sockets implemented as per the Berkeley sockets specification?
Are all sockets implemented as per the Berkeley sockets specification in all platforms or languages? What I am trying to understand is; is this the only standard for sockets implementation or there ...
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Should we switch to standard functions for utilities?
Many projects need a set of various utilities. There is some discussion about where to place them. But what happens if the utility becomes part of the standard?
For example, C++ kept adding to the ...
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Consequences of not doing a REST API the "right" way?
I'll ask this question this way - what are the software engineering concerns for not implementing my REST API the "right" way?
What do you mean the "right" way? Well, allow me to explain my ...
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Is there some sort of standardisation for error reporting? [closed]
I'm looking for some sort of standardisation, in a similar vein as POSIX for compatibility and familiarity between different commandline-interfaces, but for error reporting. Notably, I'm looking for:
...
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Does the implementation of GDPR compliance per site make sense in terms of good practises?
Although I understand privacy concerns, the measure has been imposed by politcians and I want to know what the proper way to put this into place would have been.
Right now, each site has to implement ...
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How to ramp-up software testing from zero on a code base of approximately six years of development and in a team without practical knowledge?
In a feedback for a (deleted) question I asked here last year, I was told that there is not easy way to do software testing. We may find prepared test cases for protocols but in most case the test are ...
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What Software Delivery Guidelines are appropriate when outsourcing?
I started working at a very small company that regularly (not too often) has to outsource some software developments. The external suppliers than have to deliver something.
As I now have seen is that ...
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What's the phone number equivalent of example.org?
RFC 2606 standard reserves the domain names example.org, example.net and example.com for the purpose of being used as examples in documentation.
What is an equivalent for a phone number (including ...
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Handling Networking on Android
While doing Android development. There is really no clear way of doing network operations, sending and receiving data.
Currently I am handing it using HttpsURLConnection and having streams to build a ...
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Should UTF-8 CSV files contain a BOM (byte order mark)?
Our line-of-business software allows the user to save certain data as CSV. Since there are a lot of different formats (all called "CSV") in use in the wild, we are tying to decide what the &...
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RFC5322 (Internet message format) ABNF rule error?
I was recently studying Internet Message Format originally RFC2822 and RFC5322. I was looking at definition of folding whitespace.
Each header field is logically a single line of characters ...
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Testing and Debugging Techniques vs. Rice's Theorem
As far as I got it correctly, as a result of Rice's theorem, the equivalence of two programs is generally not decidable.
Nevertheless, there exists a wide variety of testing and debugging techniques, ...
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Is the URL 'users/new' RESTful?
I was in a job interview demo-ing a RESTful API in Flask when an argument broke about the API. The interviewer argued that the URL for adding a new user (/users/new) is not proper REST.
My API ...
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When should new C projects target very old C standards (>20 years old, i.e. C89)?
Occasionally I see major, relatively new, open source C projects targeting very old C standards, typically C89. An example is systemd. These projects have intelligent people at the helm so they ...
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How to answer someone who says that quality standards in code are irrelevant? [duplicate]
I had a conversation once with a with a senior development manager. I said that I aimed to produce "good" code, meaning code that is high quality. He said that good code is functional, performant ...
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What is actually the difference between the GNU C Library and the C standard Library?
I sometimes see these two terms be used interchangeably.
What is the actual difference between these two terms? How are they used differently? Are there any other alternatives to these two libraries?
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IEC62304 SOUP classification of Integrated Development Environments and compilers
I am interested in whether IDEs, compilers or linkers are considered SOUP in IEC62304. I found one website which claimed this is not the case. I think I agree based on my reading of the standard, ...
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What time horizon and level of abstraction is the right for the maintainable and evolvable software? [closed]
From time to time I feel exhausted in my software development efforts because I am pressed to think and develop in very specific and very short term manner. One client here and now requires one ...
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Are tables inside tables a good idea in the right circumstance
I found myself wanting to put a table in a table. I had a momentary war flashback of legacy webpages and email html templates and was about to shelve the idea, but then I considered that it kind of ...
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Why shouldn't you create a custom uri scheme?
In setting up deep linking to android and iOS apps, I've made some use of custom URI schemes, and they work great, especially as a fallback when the mechanism that allows maps from http: fails (as ...
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When were unsigned types first introduced in programming languages?
Recently I learned that standard Fortran does not support unsigned integers. Fortran is a language with a very long history. I suppose that when Fortran was first designed, there simply wasn't any ...
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Is there a standard way to refer to items inside a menu when writing documentation?
At several times in the past while writing software documentation -- including user manuals, user stories, bug reports, test cases, and emails to users/colleagues -- I've needed to be able to refer to ...
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"preempts no lexical conventions" in a Scheme PL report
I am reading "Revised^5 Report on the Algorithmic Language Scheme," "1.3.1. Primitive, library, and optional features."
In particular, implementations must support portable code by providing
a ...
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Android intent: Using ?q= in a geo: URI [closed]
I noticed that the Airbnb Android app sends such an intent to open a map app at a particular latitude/longitude:
geo:0:0?q=77.77%2C88.88
From my simplistic point of view, they should use the ...
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Language code for translation placeholders and translation context?
I'm planning to add a feature to my application where you can switch to the "Translation" locale and then see the names of the translation placeholders in the application instead of the actual ...
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Coding standard for clarity: comment every line of code?
I've worked in shops that produce life critical software and I've dealt with commenting rules that were meant to keep the code readable and potentially save lives. In my experience though the ...
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C++ preprocessor search path search order
Is the #include order guaranteed by the standard to be the order of the -I options in the invocation:
example:
having the folders and files:
A/foo.h
B/foo.h
can it be guaranteed that
#include <...
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Why is it CRUD instead of GRAS? [closed]
Why is it
Create
Read
Update
Delete
instead of
Get
Remove
Add
Set
?
I've been working with an API that uses ADD and SET and REMOVE. Most accessor functions are named get...() and set...(). I ...
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Are there any formalised minimum quality standards for software development?
I've joined a very large new company who have very different ideas about what constitutes quality in development. In trying to convince managers about what should change, are there any well accepted ...
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Prescriptive and descriptive models of SW development - why it is not clear?
I have always thought that “descriptive” models says “what” but do not specify “how”, while “prescriptive” ones do exactly that. But when I started checking the topic, I found a lot of contradictions. ...
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Why isn't the C standard free? [duplicate]
I'm gradually learning C, and, after my best attempt at piracy, have resigned myself to the fact that I will have to either shell out $60 to ANSI or settle for pirating the penultimate draft hosted on ...
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Should compilers follow the defined language standard?
Why do some compilers violate the defined language standard?
I don't understand, in ISO/IEC 10206:1990 Extended Pascal standard on 6.8.3.2 Arithmetic operators section, Page 86.
It says that,
A ...
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Specifying domain-specific data structures as an open standard
I am interested in creating a specification for the representation of complex hierarchical (domain-specific) data in a way that is independent of implementation. Think of a blueprint from which you ...
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