2010/5/19 David Herman <[email protected]>: >> You're still not understanding me. My cat could write an executable >> implementation of the ES standard library. (Seriously, he's an amazing cat.) > > Hm. I was feeling silly at the time but that just came across mean. Sorry > about that. All I meant was that there's more to the spec than just whether > it's executable, and in fact being executable is sometimes exactly *not* what > you want.
If I understand, we could specify Array.prototype.sort in some subset of an imperative language which would mean that for all inputs we would specify the state of the outputs. In English, we specify macroscopic properties of the outputs -- the properties that programmers can rely on -- while leaving enough slack for implementors to experiment. (The below is only for comparative value, not a suggestion.) One language based specification equivalent of this might be specifying Array.prototype.sort in something like prolog, where you have can define predicates describing sortedness (given a good comparator), stability, termination given misbehaving comparators, etc. But ES is better suited to concisely defining a sort algorithm than defining sortedness. > Dave > > _______________________________________________ > es-discuss mailing list > [email protected] > https://mail.mozilla.org/listinfo/es-discuss > _______________________________________________ es-discuss mailing list [email protected] https://mail.mozilla.org/listinfo/es-discuss
