Biggest Issue with D - Definition and Versioning

Walter Bright newshound2 at digitalmars.com
Thu Jan 12 22:08:11 PST 2012


On 1/12/2012 1:55 PM, Peter Alexander wrote:
>> It's the "Language Reference" section on dlang.org.
> Yes, but there's differences between the language reference and what DMD
> implements. Sometimes the language reference is right, sometimes DMD is right.
> The point is, there's no way for us to know. Only you can decide what is right.

For each difference, somebody has to make a decision which is right. That 
doesn't mean the Language Reference is not the D specification. It can have 
errors in it like anything else.

The idea is to identify those discrepancies and get them fixed.

> One example off the top of my head (there are many more):
>
>  From the Lexical page on dlang.org
>
> q{ @ } // error, @ is not a valid D token
>
> But DMD accepts this.

Yes, and now your pull request on that has been pulled. Thanks! That issue is 
now resolved. On to the next one.

> You've said to post bugs, but these don't receive any attention. For example,
> here's two bugs about the lack of documentation on .stringof, one from 2009 and
> one from early 2011:
>
> http://d.puremagic.com/issues/show_bug.cgi?id=3007
> http://d.puremagic.com/issues/show_bug.cgi?id=5404
>
> Neither of which have received any comments or clarifications.

I'm sorry about that, but I'm running as fast as I can, along with the help of a 
number of prolific contributors. As you can see by the changelog, there are a 
zillion issues that do get resolved every month.


> We need a real, up to date, and detailed language specification! Leave the
> implementation to us.

The only way to do it is to identify the issues one by one. I don't know of any 
other way.

(And a number of people have submitted improvements to the spec, some of them 
quite extensive, like Stewart Gordon's, which have been incorporated.)


More information about the Digitalmars-d mailing list