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Subject: Re: [PHP-DEV] PHP Specification
From: ivan.enderlin@hoa-project.net ("Ivan Enderlin @ Hoa")

On 25/03/2014 14:16, Christian Stoller 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.
>>
>> Language should be concerned with syntax, semantics and standard libraries.
>>
>> Cheers,
>> David
> Maybe it's a stupid question, but putting the current documentation into a proper format wouldn't it be a specification of the PHP language? Maybe not a complete specification and with some overhead, but it would provide all information for third party implementations, or not?
Nop :-). We have already answered to this question in this thread :-).

-- 
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/