stability

[Edward Diener]

Bill Baxter wrote:
> 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.

Python has a Python Reference Manual as part of eeach release. AFAIK 
that is the specification for end-users, and if there is something in 
the Python language which does not confrom to that reference manual it 
is considered a bug when reported to Python. The reference manual is 
firmly embedded in the documentation for each release and the 
documentation comes fully formed as part of an installation of that 
release. This is at what D must aim if it intends to become a language 
to be used by the end-user programmer.

Without a specification for each language release a computer language 
just ends up being a small club of those in the know rather than a 
useful product for end-users to create modules and applications.