What can the community do to help D?

[Peter Alexander]

On 23/10/10 7:30 PM, Walter Bright wrote:
> Peter Alexander wrote:
>> There have been threads about what the biggest issues with D are, and
>> about the top priorities for D are, but I don't think there has been a
>> thread about what the best things are that the community can do to
>> help D.
>
> Some things are (pick one that interests you):
>
> Go through bugzilla and submit patches for bugs
>
> Contribute to the GDC and LDC projects

These two a very difficult without a complete language spec. I just had 
a look through a bunch of bugs and I couldn't even tell if they are bugs 
or not because there's no spec to tell me.

For example, a recent bug regards the validity of:

void main()
{
   { static int x; }
   { static int x; }
}

It produces a linker error just now, but I don't know if that's correct 
behavior or not. The D website makes no mention of the correct behavior 
and TDPL doesn't go into that much detail either.

In fact, I don't think the website mentions static function scope 
variables at all (though TDPL does).

Even veteran D coders are confused about what's supposed to work and 
what's not: 
http://www.digitalmars.com/pnews/read.php?server=news.digitalmars.com&group=digitalmars.D&artnum=120112

I don't mean to be negative, but it would really help the language if 
there was a complete spec. Until there is, people will be reluctant to 
fix bugs, nobody is going to attempt to write another compiler, and 
certainly no one can write better documentation if they don't know how 
things work.