From: Lothar Scholz <mailinglists@...>
Date: 2005-08-19T10:19:15+09:00
Subject: Re: Ruby Specifications

Hello Phil,

PT> In article <20050818193338.C0A2533D5F@beryllium.ruby-lang.org>,
PT> Dion Almaer <dion@almaer.com> wrote:
>>
>>Who needs specs when you can just have exegenesis/apocalypse style fluffing
>>around? :)
>>
>>A spec would be good from a "business" sense. I know of a few large
>>companies that are worried about "betting on one Japanese fellow". 


PT> I don't get it, what's the issue?  Ruby as it exists in it's current form
PT> is usable - How would a language spec make them feel any better?  I could

I think a language needs a formal specification.

If you have mission critical applications it's a little bit hard to
take this "C is the specification" argument.

I posted into the past that i really don't like it that matz break
compatibility in minor release changes. Suddenly returning a "[]" instead
of "nil" might be a small change but it can cost millions of dollars if it
happens in a critical environment.

If we had a specification for this it might restrict matz to make
changes like this, just because it feels better. This works for a
hacker language but i know that many companies got afraid when hearing
about this.


-- 
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 Lothar Scholz                        http://www.ruby-ide.com
 CTO Scriptolutions                   Ruby, PHP, Python IDE 's