military, government, and manufacturing companies, by refusing to buy such computing equipment if the vendor only offered a compiler for the programming languages they used which wasn't compliant with the standard, Results Currently, there are more than a dozen programming languages that have standards describing how programs in the language are supposed to be written, including Ada, APL, BASIC, C++, COBOL, ECMAScript (the generic name for JavaScript), Forth, FORTRAN, Pascal, PL/I, Ruby and SQL. Many of these are still in use, in some cases, because customers were able to take their source code to a different manufacturer's computer, where it was recompiled, often without change, because of the standardization of programming languages. While the standards helped, the WOCA philosophy works only when the makers of compilers ensure that they follow the standard. See also Pivot language Software engineering folklore Computer programming folklore Programming language folklore Interoperability