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

On Tue, 21 Nov 2000, Andi Gutmans wrote: > BTW, most standards have examples for most things. Yes, for complex things. I don't consider while loops to be that complex to warrant five examples and a page of text. =) Ok, how about making this is a three step process: Task 1: Defining the syntax This will be a simple list of syntactical rules. Task 2: Defining the semantics This will define the behaviour of each construct. Not anything else. Examples will be provided, if suitable. Task 3: Making it user-friendly This will add explanations for the results of Task 1+2 to make it accessible to all users. As our documentation team has had great success with DocBook and XML, I'd like to evaluate whether we can use it here as well. We basically need a way to express syntactical rules in XML. Is that possible? Are there existing tools for this purpose? - Sascha