stability

[Leandro Lucarella]

Bill Baxter, el 25 de febrero a las 04:09 me escribiste:
> Janice Caron wrote:
> >On 24/02/2008, Derek Parnell <derek at psych.ward> wrote:
> >> However, how will we know if an application contains bugs if you can't know
> >> "what the designer intended it to do" in the first place?
> >You could ask.
> >Too easy?
> 
> In fact that's exactly what happens.  People either ask here or they file a bug report 
> stating "this looks like a bug" and Walter responds "no that's behaving according to 
> design".
> 
> I'm not sure why some folks are so adamant about the spec thing.  Perl, Python, and Ruby 
> are quite popular, but none of them has a detailed spec as far as I know.  And if they do, 
> I'd bet that came about /after/ they became popular.  So lack of a detailed spec did not 
> prevent widespread adoption.

I think languages will well defined specifications are the only ones with
several compilers/interpreters. Python has a well defined specification[1]
(for a long, long time, AFAIK), and AFAIK again, is the only one that has
several interpreters[2].

And there is a *huge* difference with D in those languages (and no, it's
not that they are interpreted): their reference implementation are *open
source* (as their development process). Other interpreters/compilers don't
have to wait to a new reference compiler/interpreted release to see what's
new and analize how to change from it, all is openly discussed and you
can see the reference implementation evolve in small deltas via a SCM to
keep up.

That's why I think that putting the frontend in a public SCM is key for D,
and I think to have a complete opensource reference implementation will
be key too in the future.

[1] http://docs.python.org/ref/ref.html
[2] http://docs.python.org/ref/implementations.html (and they are more in
    progress, like http://www.philhassey.com/blog/category/tinypy/)

-- 
Leandro Lucarella (luca) | Blog colectivo: http://www.mazziblog.com.ar/blog/
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