stability

[Jesse Phillips]

On Sun, 24 Feb 2008 09:28:25 -0500, Jarrett Billingsley wrote:

> "Derek Parnell" <derek at psych.ward> wrote in message
> news:fg6iag085q4z.1pwf80bx3vys3.dlg at 40tude.net...
>>
>> A bug is where the current behaviour is contrary to the specification.
>> An enhancement is proposed behaviour that is not documented in the
>> specification.
>>
>> The problem we (including Walter) have is that D does not have a
>> specification and therefore there is no method to determine if a given
>> behaviour is by design or a mistake. All we have is "common sense",
>> "that's
>> how C++/Java/C#/XXX does it", "it feels right", etc ...
> 
> Exactly.  The "struct tupleof not able to access private members" that
> was fixed in the most recent D2 update is a perfect example of this. 
> tupleof is very ill-defined in the spec, so it's not entirely clear
> _what_ it should do, so it seems kind of arbitrary to classify that
> ability as an enhancement rather than a bug.
> 
> This is the kind of stuff that would not happen with an exhaustively
> detailed spec.

What makes you think the exhaustively detailed spec would not say the 
same thing? In my opinion if Walter put for the effort to write such a 
spec it would just state those things that the compiler does. (Yes if the 
spec was fully written out an critiqued then it could be corrected, but 
that is the same thing that is happening to the development compiler.)