Re: [PHP-LANG] "Mission Statement"

On Tue, 21 Nov 2000, Andi Gutmans wrote:

> Sascha,
> 
> The idea of writing a spec was so that users know what syntax/semantics 
> they can rely on and which not. We thought this would be a nice thing. What 
> it should do is describe the current implementation (what we don't consider 
> side-effects), AND descriptions of the host platform specific behavior as 
> it's part of the language.
> I don't want this spec to become a "how we would love to see PHP in the 
> future" because then it becomes unusable to the average PHP user who we 
> were aiming at.
> We could have a special section for future improvements to the language 
> (which should be the last thing we work on unless we bump on things while 
> writing the spec).
> Anyway, I need to go so in short. The main concern in the beginning is to 
> cover PHP 4 the way it is today without the side-effects (i.e. try to 
> standardize how it can be used and how it shouldn't be used). Anything 
> which isn't in the spec is undefined.

Speaking as more or less an outsider to the whole process, I wonder if
future improvements even have a place in a language spec. It seems to me
the best approach would be to first establish a spec based soley on how
PHP behaves in the here and now.  Once that is completed, or at least
fleshed out to a reasonable point, drafting a future spec could be done to
include features that the drafters would like to accomplish in the future.
However, even if an 'in the future' spec were drafted, woulud it be of any
use to the developers?  If not, maybe this isn't the right place to lay
out future ideas.

Matt