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BeetleB • yesterday at 9:17 PM • 3 replies • view on HN

> SHOULD is a requirement.

I once had a job where reading standards documents was my bread and butter.

SHOULD is not a requirement. It is a recommendation. For requirements they use SHALL.

My team was writing code that was safety related. Bad bugs could mean lives lost. We happily ignored a lot of SHOULDs and were open about it. We did it not because we had a good reason, but because it was convenient. We never justified it. Before our code could be released, everything was audited by a 3rd party auditor.

It's totally fine to ignore SHOULD.

Replies

dsl • yesterday at 10:57 PM

Maybe the standards documents you are used to differ from RFCs, but here is the official language:

   3. SHOULD   This word, or the adjective "RECOMMENDED", mean that there
      may exist valid reasons in particular circumstances to ignore a
      particular item, but the full implications must be understood and
      carefully weighed before choosing a different course.
SHOULD is effectively REQUIRED unless it conflicts with another standards requirement or you have a very specific edge case.
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seb1204 • yesterday at 10:16 PM

Yes, except there seems to be a move on the best words from SHALL to MUST and from SHOULD to MAY. IANAL but I recall reading this in e.g. legal language guidance sites.

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calvinmorrison • today at 12:03 AM

Email is about standards like browsers were about standards in 2017...