[biblio] acm.bst bug?

[Peter Selinger]

Sounds fair enough! -- Peter

Karl Berry wrote:
> 
> Forwarding this message from Oren ...
> 
> --------------------
> 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.
>