stability

[Bill Baxter]

Edward Diener wrote:
> 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.

That sounds exactly like the situation with D currently.  The current 
version of the spec/documentation web pages ships with every compiler 
release.  The Python Reference Manual doesn't look to be much different 
in level of detail from the D spec web pages.

--bb