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

> 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.

    - Sascha