On 25/03/2014, at 7:31 PM, Ivan Enderlin @ Hoa <[email protected]> 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