Re: Why is a Gcode standard important???

A significant reason why standards (in general) are important is that they
tend to lead to more competition in the market concerned, and eventually to
more user choice and cheaper products. The advantage to the users (whether
individual or group) is fairly obvious. As Ballendo points out, the PC
marketplace is a good example; the wide variety of desktop machines that
are available today, and the incredibly low price that you pay for them, is
at least in part a result of the fact that they all share a common
"standard" specification. Another good example is Ethernet, which is now
pretty much ubiquitous as a means of interconnecting desktop devices, and
which now costs about $20 per PC interface card. versus 10-20 times that
price when the technology was first developed a couple of decades ago.

And it is not just the cost of the products that you have to consider - it
is also the very real costs associated with learning how to deal with
different technologies all of which do the same thing. If you were to toss
your existing CNC machinery, which is programmed in XX-code, and replace it
with new machinery that is programmed in (a completely different) YY-code,
there is a learning curve to be gone through, involving time (= money)
along with attendant costs, for example to replace the CAD/CAM front ends
that you use to generate the code, or modify it to generate the right syntax.

Regards,
Tony

At 21:28 26/12/2001 +0000, you wrote:

>Did you read my previous post? In it, I stated that there was not any
>reason for any given INDIVIDUAL to adopt/desire a standard. I also
>gave several reasons for a GROUP to desire/adopt a standard.
>
>Standardising "conversational" would be excellent!
>
>Saying that the machines themselves are not standardised is like
>saying that pc's are not standardised. Of course, there are
>variations in computers, but the "standard" of the desktop, which is
>MS office, seems not only to work on this extremely large variety of
>machines, and also doing a large variety of tasks. (leaving MS
>bashing out of this discussion)
>
>In any large group sharing a language, it is unlikely for any given
>person to need ALL the languages "words". But there will be a core
>group of words that can reasonably be expected to be used by most
>everyone. And these will be standardised.
>Also, The language "extensions" used by fringe elements of the group,
>will also become part of the "standard", even though the majority is
>not using them most of the time. But if my work takes me into the
>medical field, I will begin to use a new (to me) part of
>the "standard".
>
>Why do all airline pilots speak english for communication, and use
>alpha/bravo/charlie/etc; regardless of their native tongue?
>
>Going one step farther, why standardise any language? We could all
>learn to speak whatever enough of us decided to use to communicate...
>Example: Grog glick been haug! (If you were part of my group you'd
>know what it means<g>) Standardisation simply increases the size of
>the "agreeing" group, with better/quicker/clearer communication as
>the result! Can you see that the same positive results become
>available to the machining industry by standardising its "language",
>in this case the code that runs the machines?