> 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
Maybe it's a stupid question, but putting the current documentation into a proper format
wouldn't it be a specification of the PHP language? Maybe not a complete specification and with
some overhead, but it would provide all information for third party implementations, or not?
Best regards
Christian