> james mccartney writes > > Which of these languages has this been done for: Python Ruby Perl? > I think that there is only one code tree for each of these languages. > Are they condemned?
Yes. Larry Rosler makes the case for Perl standardization: http://www.perl.com/pub/a/2000/06/rosler.html Without a standards document that precisely defines the semantics of a language, there's no way to know what the language is. Even _you_ don't really know without the document -- every change to the existing codebase is a decision made on the fly, as to what is normative and what is not, without a documentation trail to back it up. Note that this argument is true even if you're planning to copyright the language and sue anyone who makes a compatible implementation -- the standards document acts as a contract between the language designer and the programmers in the language, a contract that insures that code written to the standard will act the same from revision to revision of the compiler, as well as from compiler to compiler. Without this semantic guarantee, the only way to make a system with confidence written in the language is to lock down the system to run with a particular binary version of the compiler forever. Do you want to be riding on a train if the train braking system runs in a system built that way? ------------------------------------------------------------------------- John Lazzaro -- Research Specialist -- CS Division -- EECS -- UC Berkeley lazzaro [at] cs [dot] berkeley [dot] edu www.cs.berkeley.edu/~lazzaro -------------------------------------------------------------------------
