[fpc-devel] FPC Language Specification

[michael]

On 2019-05-20 21:59, J. Gareth Moreton wrote:
> 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.

Normally, you have a committee of people working on such things,
and on top you have a backlog which will probably take the rest of your 
life to catch up with.

But hey, it's your time, don't let me stop you...

Michael.