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Comment by krylon | Hacker News Reader

It's kind of the default for ISO standards, not just for programming languages. Ada is - to my knowledge - the exception, the standard document and the rationale are available free of charge.

However, the draft documents are usually available for free, and the difference between the final draft and the official standard is usually miniscule (typos, punctuation errors, and so forth). You can probably find it on the working group's web site.

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Yup, this. The final version the committee actually works on is free for C, C++ and Fortran. After that ISO has it. I’m honestly not sure I would trust the final as much as the final draft. You can also build the c++ spec from the latex for yourself, the repo is public.

> However, the draft documents are usually available for free

Unfortunately, not for SQL :(

It's the default but are these orgs really getting significant funding from that kind of end-user hostile behavior? (And some drafts are available and sufficient but not in all fields)

I don't know a lot about standards organisations. But the people who actually create the standards are not getting paid by ISO. So I don't know what expenses ISO has to cover other than the cost of publishing the standard itself, which in digital form should be very low.

In a corporate setting it might not be as big an issue, but as a private citizen who wants to read a standard document for educational purposes, paying upward of 100 bucks is fairly expensive, so this makes me a bit grumpy. I completely agree with your sentiment.

https://wg5-fortran.org/f2023.html

Thank you very much!

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