views:

120

answers:

3

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?)

A: 

What about Wikipedia? Here is an explanation of the ISO 639 standard that lists short codes for language names and the Wikipedia list of languages has a good collection with language ISO codes in all kinds of formats.

Cimm
One of the tags is [programming-languages]
Henk Holterman
Oops, sorry, missed that one...
Cimm
+5  A: 

I'm not sure ISO certifies programming languages.

As an institute it does issue standards for certain programming languages.

Henk Holterman
+3  A: 

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.

Marcelo Cantos
It might be helpful to note that ISO is not the only organization that issues programming language standards. Common Lisp is an ANSI standard, and I don't believe it's an ISO standard. (ANSI is the US standards organization, functioning either independently or as the US national body for ISO as needed.) There's also less prestigious bodies, such as ECMA, which has standardized several programming languages. My impression of ECMA is that it's less rigorous in its requirements than ANSI or ISO.
David Thornley
Often the ISO standard is just whichever national body already prepared a standard. So ISO 'C' is just ANSI 'C'
Martin Beckett
@Martin Beckett: Certainly. And it can also happen the other way around, as was the case with C++.
Marcelo Cantos