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Date: Fri, 7 May 2021 10:10:49 +0200
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To: "Christoph M. Becker" <cmbecker69@gmx.de>
Cc: PHP Internals List <internals@lists.php.net>
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Subject: Re: [PHP-DEV] PHP Language Specification
From: nikita.ppv@gmail.com (Nikita Popov)

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On Thu, May 6, 2021 at 4:01 PM Christoph M. Becker <cmbecker69@gmx.de>
wrote:

> Hi all,
>
> I wonder what to do with the PHP Language Specification[1].  Apparently,
> the repo is abandoned (last commit was more than a year ago, although
> PHP 8 changed quite some stuff).  If we don't have the bandwidth to
> maintain it, we should mark it as unmaintained, and maybe some of the
> information could be moved to the PHP manual  (I quite like the strict
> syntax specification, which the manual almost completely lacks).


To offer a counter-opinion to what others said: Yes, we should absolutely
discontinue the language specification.

The thing is, this is a project without purpose, or at least no purpose
that I am able to discern. Without a very significant amount of effort, the
language specification is so far removed from being either accurate or
complete, that it is of very limited usefulness to alternative
implementations of PHP. The grammar is probably the only part that's
somewhat accurate --  and I think people can get similar mileage from just
looking at zend_language_parser.y directly, which happens to reflect the
ground truth and never get outdated.

I think the only real usefulness the language specification has right now
is that we're able to say "we have a specification".

Now, if someone does want to pick up maintenance, be my guest, but I think
requiring RFC authors or core developers to update the spec is a
misallocation of resources: If we want to include "writing documentation"
as part of the change process, then it would be much more valuable to write
documentation for php.net, which is used by hundreds of thousands of
developers, rather than the language specification, which is used by a
handful at best.

Regards,
Nikita

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