On 2019-05-20 21:59, J. Gareth Moreton wrote:
On 20/05/2019 09:44, Michael Van Canneyt wrote:
On Mon, 20 May 2019, J. Gareth Moreton wrote:
While there is documentation online that can easily explain all of
this, I find it's only truly useful if you are looking up details
on a specific feature - for example, the standard of expanding
intermediate expressions to the CPU word size has caught many
programmers off-guard. Having it in a single specification means
that the curious can read through it in its entirety to learn of
these nuances before falling foul of them.
What are your thoughts?
Maybe start from the official ISO pascal or extended pascal specs
and
rewrite that to match the compiler implementation.
Michael.
Normally it doesn't quite work that way. It's more about what we
expect and desire the language to do from a design perspective - it is
allowed to change with implementation considerations, but normally
it's not the first point of consideration. To give the example of
case blocks, since that's been a point of contention lately, do we
specify that all possible input values have a valid branch and
enumerated inputs aren't range-checked, or do we just go by the
implementation and say "it's not a bug, it's a feature" if something
looks different? There's also the point that we may desire the
language to behave a certain way, but a subtle bug in the
implementation means that it doesn't under certain circumstances?
I suppose going by the implementation is better than nothing, but
normally it's not taken to be the definitive authoritive guide.
Normally, you have a committee of people working on such things,
and on top you have a backlog which will probably take the rest of your
life to catch up with.
But hey, it's your time, don't let me stop you...
Michael.
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