Biggest Issue with D - Definition and Versioning

[Peter Alexander]

On 18/01/12 9:55 PM, Walter Bright wrote:
> On 1/18/2012 1:12 PM, Zachary Lund wrote:
>> On Wednesday, 18 January 2012 at 20:41:14 UTC, Walter Bright wrote:
>>> On 1/18/2012 12:10 PM, deadalnix wrote:
>>>> Usually, a newcomer isn't even sure if the bug comes from his/her
>>>> code or from
>>>> the compiler. How can you expect them to fill a bug about the spec ???
>>>
>>> That's what these forums are for - to ask.
>>
>> You don't think that lowers the probability of someone wanting to use D?
>
> What do you suggest?

Well, it's kind of too late now, but ideally the implementation and 
documentation should have evolved together, so that the situation we are 
in now wouldn't have happened.

What happened instead was an incomplete spec popped up with no 
implementation then the implementation tried to match it, whilst 
changing parts of it (without updating the documentation) along the way. 
We also now have the TDPL, which in parts disagrees with both the 
implementation and the original spec.

What we can do now:

1. Hope that people are knowledgeable and willing enough to update the 
documentation to match the current language state.

2. Ensure that any submitted pull requests into DMD that change language 
features are also documented in the language spec at the same time. 
Recent example: array covariance changed, but the language spec didn't. 
I'm working on a pull request to fix the spec now.

We have to be much more diligent about keeping the spec up to date.