So I assume it is possible for an ISO 9000 environment to allow for ad hoc sed scripts to fix trivial problems, and it would be the specific institution, and not ISO 9000, that is broken (IMHO) if anal rule prevented such utilitarian acts?
ISO9000 is a pretty broad word these days. As someone amusingly pointed out, you can ride in an ISO9000 taxi. When I raised the point about not using a sed script to change code becuase of implications in an ISO9000 environment, I was talking about a slightly more "normal" usage of the term "ISO9000".
It is common, in military and government work, especially when the contracts span multiple governments, that you have to be "ISO9000 compliant". Yes, the standards body in whatever country you work have to verify that you do have coding practices and procedures defined and that you do adhere to them, but thats not the important audit. Certainly in the environment in which I worked, it was the project itself that audited the procedures to make sure they were sane. So the standards body tests your adherance to the procedures, but the client tests the quality of the procedures themselves. I have limited exposure to ISO9000 environments but the one in which I did work, where the software was responsible for maintaining billions and billions of dollars of equipment across multiple government boundaries, those procedures were anal in the extreme. Every single line of code had been audited, both internally and by two independent auditors. The procedures we had to follow to make even a single line change in parts of the system ran into months. In such an environment, "just use a sed script" is a totally unacceptable solution. It was actually *easier* for us to move from Sunpro cc to gcc than it was to make changes to certain parts of the system. Part of the reason is that compilers were frequently "certified" for a much broader range of products, so once it was on the customer's "approved" list, we were free to change compilers. Of course, we didn't have code that had funky newline problems :) Kean
