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

On Tue, 21 Nov 2000, Andi Gutmans wrote:

> BTW, most standards have examples for most things.

    Yes, for complex things. I don't consider while loops to be
    that complex to warrant five examples and a page of text. =)

    Ok, how about making this is a three step process:

    Task 1: Defining the syntax

        This will be a simple list of syntactical rules.

    Task 2: Defining the semantics

        This will define the behaviour of each construct. Not
        anything else. Examples will be provided, if suitable.

    Task 3: Making it user-friendly

        This will add explanations for the results of Task 1+2 to
        make it accessible to all users.

    As our documentation team has had great success with DocBook
    and XML, I'd like to evaluate whether we can use it here as
    well. We basically need a way to express syntactical rules in
    XML. Is that possible? Are there existing tools for this
    purpose?

    - Sascha