[fpc-devel] FPC Language Specification

[J. Gareth Moreton]

On 20/05/2019 09:44, Michael Van Canneyt wrote:
>
>
> On Mon, 20 May 2019, J. Gareth Moreton wrote:
>
>>
>> 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.
>>
>> What are your thoughts?
>
> Maybe start from the official ISO pascal or extended pascal specs and
> rewrite that to match the compiler implementation.
>
> Michael. 

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?

I suppose going by the implementation is better than nothing, but 
normally it's not taken to be the definitive authoritive guide.

And for new features like *pure* functions, I much rather have something 
written down and locked before I blindly start programming them and 
making it up as I go along.

Gareth aka. Kit



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