Generic base standards

Generic base standards, that is, ones defining these fundamental concepts of information technology, offer a way of improving standardization in IT by enabling greater commonality. The paper looks briefly at the fundamental base standards of terminology and character sets. It then considers in more depth two other generic base concepts: syntactic metalanguages (for example, Backus Naur form) and numeric floating-point constants. Case studies illustrate typical unnecessary variations in existing standards and demonstrate that even the simplest ideas are treated in widely different ways