Re: [PHP-DEV] Re: [PHP-LANG] Approaching the First Draft [of a language spec] From: Andi Gutmans (andi <email protected>)
Date: 11/21/00

At 01:12 AM 11/21/00 +0100, Sascha Schumann wrote:
> > 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.

When we discussed it the whole idea (at least as I saw it) was that this
would be a useful document to the PHP users. Yes, it will be less formal
than the C/C++ standards although I know you like formality. It should have
examples (the Java and C++ have) and it should answer PHP programmers'
questions concerning language semantics.
It is for the user.
Andi 

---
Andi Gutmans <andi <email protected>>
http://www.zend.com/

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