[biblio] acm.bst bug?

[Karl Berry]

Forwarding this message from Oren ...

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From: Oren Patashnik

I thought I should give one final reply in the acm.bst thread,
starting with some background.

When we first distributed BibTeX, there were four standard styles --
plain.bst, abbrv.bst, alpha.bst, and unsrt.bst.  They were "standard"
in the sense that we included them in the standard distribution, not
that they necessarily implemented the style standards of anybody or
any organization (although they generally followed the advice of
Mary-Claire van Leunen in her *A Handbook for Scholars*).  These
standard styles were basically example styles.

We also included as examples in the standard distribution four other
styles (sometimes called semi-standard styles) -- apalike.bst,
acm.bst, ieeetr.bst, and siam.bst -- with the latter three being
approximations to what appeared in certain organizations' journals.
I was mainly responsible for creating apalike.bst, and Howard Trickey,
the other three.  I remember Howard saying that one organization
(either ACM or IEEE, I think) claimed that they followed a certain
style, but in fact there were style differences among the
organization's journals, and there was even style variability within a
journal and within single issues.  The reality is that many journals
change their stated styles with changes in editor; and some editors
adhere to their stated style better than others.

So it doesn't make sense for the semi-standard styles in the BibTeX
distribution to try to keep up with whatever the current editors of an
organization's journals claim is their current style.  There's much
more utility in having those styles produce the same output (given the
same input) now as they did when they were first created.

Or to put it another way, it's better to think of the BibTeX
distribution semi-standard style

  acm.bst

as something like

  an-approximation-to-the-ACM-style-of-the-mid-1980s.bst

than as

  the-exact-style-as-currently-decreed-by-the-ACM.bst

So acm.bst will stay as is.