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Subject: Re: [PHP-DEV] PHP Specification
From: ivan.enderlin@hoa-project.net ("Ivan Enderlin @ Hoa")

On 25/03/2014 13:52, David Muir wrote:
> On 25/03/2014, at 7:31 PM, Ivan Enderlin @ Hoa <ivan.enderlin@hoa-project.net> wrote:
>
>> I am not sure to understand your proposal well, but instead of producing a full complete specification at first, we should focus on important features than other implementations do not support. Typically, the fact the `php` binary reads from its stdin is missing most of the time.
>>
>> I imagine to start the specification at different levels:
>>
>>   * the syntax, which is not easy since PHP grammars is ambigious but it's feasible in a reasonable time,
>>   * the semantics, very very important, it will describe how data are represented, objects etc., how they behaves, it will clarify a lot of things
>>   * the tool, i.e. the PHP architecture through SAPI, one of the most clever feature of PHP,
>>   * the extension, how are they split in different directories, how to load them etc. (still from the user point of view)
>>   * then the standard library, which includes ext/core, ext/standard, ext/stream etc.
>>
>> The goal is not, at first, to specify the behavior of all functions. This would be totally crazy. PHP has a big tests suite to check that. Before, the most important thing (for me) is to specify the langage (syntax, semantics and tool). This is a good start and a nice task since types, auto-boxing, generators etc., will be described in those parts.
>>
>
> I don't think the SAPI and extension parts should be part of a language specification. To me, those are implementation concerns.
Yes maybe. But it must be specified that PHP works behind a FastCGI 
server, and how variables and environment from the server and the system 
is set.


> Language should be concerned with syntax, semantics and standard libraries.
Certainly.

-- 
Ivan Enderlin
Developer of Hoa
http://hoa-project.net/

PhD. student at DISC/Femto-ST (Vesontio) and INRIA (Cassis)
http://disc.univ-fcomte.fr/ and http://www.inria.fr/

Member of HTML and WebApps Working Group of W3C
http://w3.org/