From: Edwin Fine Date: 2006-12-08T14:37:58+09:00 Subject: Re: Show your support for Rubinius! AFAIK, Ruby does not have a formal language specification. The language is pretty much defined by the Ruby C code (a Bison parser created from parse.y). This makes it difficult to have a high degree of confidence that any other implementations will match the original Ruby's behavior precisely. This is a problem that the JRuby developers highlighted in a recent interview (http://www.oreillynet.com/ruby/blog/2006/07/interviewing_the_jruby_develop.html). From the interview: ----- "I would really like to see multiple implementations of Ruby the language end up generating a consistent definition of Ruby that is not determined by someone changing a line of C code. I give great credit to the C Ruby developers in designing a great language, but the lack of a formal language specification will eventually become a liability. The more implementations hopefully will highlight the need for a formal language specification." ----- Maybe things have changed since then; if so, I haven't seen anything about it. I think that one really major contribution that the Rubinius project could make (besides another interpreter) would be to create an initial formal language specification. Of course, it is a complex, horrible, thankless, and time-consuming job to do this for anything but a toy language, so I don't foresee a plethora of volunteers :) -- Posted via http://www.ruby-forum.com/.