Paul Anderson wrote:
Hi Paul,
I really appreciate your efforts in maintaining this discussion, it brings a lot of value to the whole process! We have discussed your comments in the regular meeting this morning. You may hear from others, but here is my perspective. .........
Many thanks for the response Dejan. This is pretty much what I had expected - I do understand the pragmatic reasons behind these decisions, but perhaps I can just summarise my concerns ..
1) If people are expected to make independent implementations of a langauge, they are much more likely to work correctly if the the language is defined by a written semantics, rather then by a reference implementation where people have to guess the significant parts of the semantics by reading someone else's code (for example, "does the order of these elements matter"?)
I also plan to have all the tests for my impl up on sourceforge for anyone to run their system against. That is, as well as a specification of behaviour, we will have tests. -test