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<div class="moz-cite-prefix">On 20/05/2019 09:44, Michael Van
Canneyt wrote:<br>
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<blockquote type="cite"
cite="mid:alpine.DEB.2.20.1905201043170.9724@home.telenet.be">
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<br>
On Mon, 20 May 2019, J. Gareth Moreton wrote:
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<blockquote type="cite">
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While there is documentation online that can easily explain all
of this, I find it's only truly useful if you are looking up
details on a specific feature - for example, the standard of
expanding intermediate expressions to the CPU word size has
caught many programmers off-guard. Having it in a single
specification means that the curious can read through it in its
entirety to learn of these nuances before falling foul of them.
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<br>
What are your thoughts?
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Maybe start from the official ISO pascal or extended pascal specs
and
<br>
rewrite that to match the compiler implementation.
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<br>
Michael.
</blockquote>
<p>Normally it doesn't quite work that way. It's more about what we
expect and desire the language to do from a design perspective -
it is allowed to change with implementation considerations, but
normally it's not the first point of consideration. To give the
example of case blocks, since that's been a point of contention
lately, do we specify that all possible input values have a valid
branch and enumerated inputs aren't range-checked, or do we just
go by the implementation and say "it's not a bug, it's a feature"
if something looks different? There's also the point that we may
desire the language to behave a certain way, but a subtle bug in
the implementation means that it doesn't under certain
circumstances?</p>
<p>I suppose going by the implementation is better than nothing, but
normally it's not taken to be the definitive authoritive guide.</p>
<p>And for new features like <b>pure</b> functions, I much rather
have something written down and locked before I blindly start
programming them and making it up as I go along.</p>
<p>Gareth aka. Kit<br>
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