From: Jeremy McAnally <jeremymcanally@...>
Date: 2006-12-11T00:00:16+09:00
Subject: Re: Show your support for Rubinius!

They are working on an official Ruby spec and testing suite.

...and it appears that I forgot the URL (if they had one...).

--Jeremy

On 12/8/06, Edwin Fine <efine145-nospam01@usa.net> wrote:
> 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/.
>
>