A world without standards

This issue of IEEE Design & Test of Computers is all about standards. Each of the papers makes an excellent argument why a particular standard is important and what benefits can be achieved by adopting the standard. As engineers we deal with standards a lot, but, like the air, I don´t think we often stop to think of their pervasiveness. The real value of standards for design description is not in defining where the semicolons go, but in solving abstraction problems in the standard so that each tool developer doesn´t have to.