Re: Re: Approaching the First Draft [of a language spec]

At 01:12 AM 11/21/00 +0100, Sascha Schumann wrote:

Well, I guess I see that a bit the other way around. I see the goal as a document that can make the user community know what the language definition is. The kind of document you are talking about, which is similar to say, ANSI C/ANSI C++ specs, are specs that are useful for compiler developers. Today, quite often, people come out with questions of 'what happens in this case'. For instance, someone asked me today on IRC whether !$foo checks if $foo is false, or if $foo is set. Today, there's no place he can go to and find an answer to his question. The way I was imagining the language spec, I thought it would address exactly those needs (well, that was just a simple example :). Syntactical rules can be useful to end users, and they're common in programming language books. If we add a description of the semantics surrounding these rules, we can end up with a document that would be useful for the average PHP programmer.

    Well, so we almost agree here.

    Syntactical rules are useless without a context which defines
    their exact semantics (see Task 2 of my proposal). That is
    the format which is chosen by the C/C++ standards as well as
    the Python Reference.

    I disagree though that the immediate result of this process
    must be a document which can be understood by your average
    IRC user. We have the manual for that.

When we discussed it the whole idea (at least as I saw it) was that this would be a useful document to the PHP users. Yes, it will be less formal than the C/C++ standards although I know you like formality. It should have examples (the Java and C++ have) and it should answer PHP programmers' questions concerning language semantics. It is for the user. Andi --- Andi Gutmans <andi@zend.com> http://www.zend.com/