Record of reference specification?

[Meredith Gregory]

Dear Scalarazzi,

How does the community feel about the state of affairs regarding the specification of Scala? Do we feel we are in a state where we could have a healthy community of different implementations? Could we readily tell which features in any given implementation were experimental and which were necessity to be called a Scala implementation? i'm thinking about the situation in Haskell land where you have GHC and Hugs and YHC and all manner of various implementations -- each of which has been a contributor to helping the community understand and improve Haskell. Do we need something akin to the Haskell98 spec?

Best wishes,

--greg

--
L.G. Meredith
Managing Partner
Biosimilarity LLC
1219 NW 83rd St
Seattle, WA 98117

+1 206.650.3740

http://biosimilarity.blogspot.com

[Raphael Jolly]

Meredith Gregory wrote:

> Dear Scalarazzi,
>
> How does the community feel about the state of affairs regarding the
> _/specification/_ of Scala? Do we feel we are in a state where we could
> have a healthy community of different implementations? Could we readily
> tell which features in any given implementation were experimental and
> which were necessity to be called a Scala implementation? i'm thinking
> about the situation in Haskell land where you have GHC and Hugs and YHC
> and all manner of various implementations -- each of which has been a
> contributor to helping the community understand and improve Haskell. Do
> we need something akin to the Haskell98 spec?

I can see at least one place where the scala specification is defectuous
: chapter 7.3 on Views. See:

Issue with implicit conversion
http://lampsvn.epfl.ch/trac/scala/ticket/1756
Re: issue with implicit conversion
http://article.gmane.org/gmane.comp.lang.scala.user/11309

Raphael

[Daniel Sobral]

IIRC, the type inferencer is not spec'ed at all.

On Mon, Oct 5, 2009 at 7:07 PM, Raphael Jolly <raphael.jolly@...> wrote:

Meredith Gregory wrote:

Dear Scalarazzi,

How does the community feel about the state of affairs regarding the _/specification/_ of Scala? Do we feel we are in a state where we could have a healthy community of different implementations? Could we readily tell which features in any given implementation were experimental and which were necessity to be called a Scala implementation? i'm thinking about the situation in Haskell land where you have GHC and Hugs and YHC and all manner of various implementations -- each of which has been a contributor to helping the community understand and improve Haskell. Do we need something akin to the Haskell98 spec?

I can see at least one place where the scala specification is defectuous : chapter 7.3 on Views. See:

Issue with implicit conversion
http://lampsvn.epfl.ch/trac/scala/ticket/1756
Re: issue with implicit conversion
http://article.gmane.org/gmane.comp.lang.scala.user/11309

Raphael

--
Daniel C. Sobral

Something I learned in academia: there are three kinds of academic reviews: review by name, review by reference and review by value.

[Eric Willigers]

Meredith Gregory wrote:

> Dear Scalarazzi,
>
> How does the community feel about the state of affairs regarding the
> _/specification/_ of Scala? Do we feel we are in a state where we could
> have a healthy community of different implementations? Could we readily
> tell which features in any given implementation were experimental and
> which were necessity to be called a Scala implementation? i'm thinking
> about the situation in Haskell land where you have GHC and Hugs and YHC
> and all manner of various implementations -- each of which has been a
> contributor to helping the community understand and improve Haskell. Do
> we need something akin to the Haskell98 spec?

As I understand it, the Scala Language Specification is intended as a
spec akin to the Haskell specs, as opposed to Haskell implementation
reference manuals.

Gaps in the manual become apparent (and are hopefully reported and
resolved) as people attempt to implement against it, e.g. IntelliJ
http://www.artima.com/lejava/articles/javaone_2008_dmitry_jemerov.html


Quite apart from the manual, Scala isn't an easy language to implement
(look at the open Trac tickets).

[Naftoli Gugenheim]

Also I think there have been cases where scalac didn't behave exactly
like the specs.

On Mon, Oct 5, 2009 at 7:16 PM, Eric Willigers <ewilligers@...> wrote:

> Meredith Gregory wrote:
>>
>> Dear Scalarazzi,
>>
>> How does the community feel about the state of affairs regarding the
>> _/specification/_ of Scala? Do we feel we are in a state where we could have
>> a healthy community of different implementations? Could we readily tell
>> which features in any given implementation were experimental and which were
>> necessity to be called a Scala implementation? i'm thinking about the
>> situation in Haskell land where you have GHC and Hugs and YHC and all manner
>> of various implementations -- each of which has been a contributor to
>> helping the community understand and improve Haskell. Do we need something
>> akin to the Haskell98 spec?
>
> As I understand it, the Scala Language Specification is intended as a spec
> akin to the Haskell specs, as opposed to Haskell implementation reference
> manuals.
>
> Gaps in the manual become apparent (and are hopefully reported and resolved)
> as people attempt to implement against it, e.g. IntelliJ
> http://www.artima.com/lejava/articles/javaone_2008_dmitry_jemerov.html
>
>
> Quite apart from the manual, Scala isn't an easy language to implement (look
> at the open Trac tickets).
>
>