I kindly ask someone who can speak for the
direction of Firebird development, to comment on
the issue of Standard Conformance in current (1.5)
and future versions of Firebird:

A. Perhaps the tables in
http://www.dbazine.com/gulutzan3.html
can be used as a start and "Firebird/now"
and "Firebird/planned" columns be made?
(BTW, an IB7 column would be nice too)

B. Also a Firebird developer's consensus (or
non-consensus) on the importance of the SQL
standard would be welcome.

Being relatively new in doing SQL in ernest (and
coming from C++), I'm somewhat disturbed by the
general non standardization of actual SQL implementations.
In C++ (despite the problem of 'extensions', which
tempt the programmers to write none-portable code) all
compiler vendors at least declare to plan to support the
ISO standard, and even Microsoft comes close to
doing so in VC7.

In SQL nearly all vendors prefer their own legacy dialect
against moving to closer to the standard. Is the standard so
bad or is there simply no business case in conforming?

Regards,
Peter Jacobi