Re: PHP Specification

On 25/03/2014, at 7:31 PM, Ivan Enderlin @ Hoa <ivan.enderlin@hoa-project.net> wrote: > I am not sure to understand your proposal well, but instead of producing a full complete > specification at first, we should focus on important features than other implementations do not > support. Typically, the fact the php binary reads from its stdin is > missing most of the time. > > I imagine to start the specification at different levels: > > * the syntax, which is not easy since PHP grammars is ambigious but it's feasible in a > reasonable time, > * the semantics, very very important, it will describe how data are represented, objects etc., > how they behaves, it will clarify a lot of things > * the tool, i.e. the PHP architecture through SAPI, one of the most clever feature of PHP, > * the extension, how are they split in different directories, how to load them etc. (still > from the user point of view) > * then the standard library, which includes ext/core, ext/standard, ext/stream etc. > > The goal is not, at first, to specify the behavior of all functions. This would be totally > crazy. PHP has a big tests suite to check that. Before, the most important thing (for me) is to > specify the langage (syntax, semantics and tool). This is a good start and a nice task since types, > auto-boxing, generators etc., will be described in those parts. > I don't think the SAPI and extension parts should be part of a language specification. To me, those are implementation concerns. Language should be concerned with syntax, semantics and standard libraries. Cheers, David