Computer Science and Programming Languages

I've seen some confusion recently about the differences between standards and programming languages.

Standards

A standard is a document which describes the structure, layout and meaning of something. Materials that follow the description are said to comply with the standard. The The Chicago Manual of Style is a standard for laying out certain kinds of print on the page. ASCII and Unicode are standards for representing strings of characters. SGML and HTML which is based on it, are standards, as are their successors XML and XHTML respectively.

Open standards are standards under the control of ``impartial'' groups and freely usable without patent infringement or licencing costs. Organisations such as the International Organization for Standardization/International Standardization Organization (ISO), the International Telecommunication Union (ITU) and the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) define open standards. Open standards you may use regularly include: the design of electrical plugs, which allow different manufacturer's appliances to plug into each other; international telephone system, which allows you to dial telephones across the world irrespective of the manufacturers of telephone at the other end or the exchanges between you; and DES/AES encryption which allow banks to communicate securely, and enable wire rather than physical money transfers.