From: "M. Edward (Ed) Borasky" Date: 2007-11-18T10:29:34+09:00 Subject: Re: Alternative Ruby grammar Charles Oliver Nutter wrote: > Sean O'Halpin wrote: >> On Nov 16, 2007 8:26 AM, Charles Oliver Nutter >> wrote: >>> At the moment, I don't like that there's >>> only two "mostly correct" parsers in existence: Ruby's Bison-based >>> parser and JRuby's Jay-based parser. >> Hi, >> >> I'm curious, what do you mean by "mostly correct" in the context of MRI? > > If MRI is considered the gold standard, then obviously it's 100% > correct. Of course, it can't be considered the gold standard, since > minor things change from release to release; so I'd say all parsers > would be some percentage of "complete" given some > implementation-independent definition of "Ruby". > > But perhaps that's just my opinion :) It's hard to say anyone is > "correct" when there's no language specification. > > - Charlie > > Which is why all implementations are "extended subsets" of a non-existing language standard. :) *Every* language works that way, at least until it has been around long enough for someone to deem it necessary to establish a standards committee and thrash out a formal definition. Some languages get to this point quickly -- FORTRAN, for example. Other languages take a long time -- Forth, for example. I doubt seriously if Perl will *ever* get there. :)