Coming Attractions

[Paul D. Anderson]

Stewart Gordon Wrote:

> Paul D. Anderson wrote:
> > A. What I'm looking forward to in the near future:
> > 
> > 1) D2 will be frozen.
> > 2) Andre's book will come out.
> > 
> > B. What I'm hopeful for, and really expect to see fairly soon thereafter:
> > 
> > 3) A complete, consistent D language specification (for D1 and D2).
> <snip>
> 
> Uh, the sequence of items 1 and 3 makes no sense at all.
> 
> Stewart.

The specification that we have in the digital mars web pages is incomplete and inconsistent. It has always lagged the compiler development. You are correct that this is nonsensical, but it is what it is. (Part of the reason is that D2 is intentionally experimental -- Walter tries ideas and pulls them in or out as the language develops, so he can't write the "specification" beforehand -- usually he updates the web pages when new language features are made public.)

I'd like to see a more formal specification, even if it is ex post facto. I doubt Walter will be providing that. I'm hoping someone steps up to make it happen. I'm willing to do it myself, but I need to put the finishing touches on the bigfloat implementation. When that's done, and if no one else jumps in, I'll tackle it.

Of course there's no reason why such a "snapshot" specification has to wait until the design is final. It can be based on any current snapshot and updated as changes occur. Again -- 100% backwards, but better, IMHO, than not done at all.

Paul