On Mon, Mar 13, 2023 at 5:00 PM Paul Winalski <paul.winalski@gmail.com>
wrote:

Dropping toxic features from a language does happen at standards
> committees, but it's rare.  The best case I know of where this
> happened was when the international standard for PL/I came out.  They
> started with IBM PL/I but then dropped a bunch of features that were
> either obsolete (e.g., sterling pictures) or downright dangerous
> (e.g., the DEFAULT statement).
>

That actually happened twice.  The 1976 standard removed features from IBM
PL/I; the 1981 Subset G standard removed even more features.  (A few were
added back in the 1987 revision of Subset G.)

> On the other side of the spectrum you have the BASIC standards
> committee.  BASIC has always had to live down a reputation that it's a
> "toy language" not suitable for "serious programming".  The standards
> committee seems to have suffered from an inferiority complex, and it
> seemed from my perspective that as fast as the PL/I committee chucked
> out toxic language, the BASIC committee adopted them.


There are two Basic standards as well: the smaller one came first.