| I think you've misunderstood the original intent as expressed by Larry Wall in 2000, the current situation, and the future intent and practical realities. For the original intent I'll quote Larry from the day he announced Perl 6 in 2000[1]: "I don't know how strict a spec it will be from the language design point of view. I'm not really big on that sort of spec and there is some value to using the reference implementation approach and what we currently have is a reference implementation [with] no second implementation, well, unless you count the JVM work, but, obviously there are benefits to having things justified well enough that you could implement another one even if you didn't want to, so we'll definitely be working in that direction and - do you have something? And there was something else I was going to say - what we particularly want to stress in terms of - is not perhaps so much the spec as developing our current regression test. Well, we call them regression tests, but they're almost more acceptance tests, but, we developed our acceptance into real regression tests then you'd further develop the real regression tests into a validation test of what the language actually means and actually go out and explore all the nooks and crannies and say, "This is Perl, this is not Perl," and then we actually have a machine-readable spec. And to me that's actually a lot more important than what the verbiage on the human readable thing says." I think the 6.Christmas release corresponds fairly directly to this original intent. In the meantime the spec docs (as against the spec test suite), which are currently referred to as either "speculations" or "design docs" to better emphasize their contemporary role, are currently well behind the test suite and implementation. This is presumably what caught your attention. The current thinking is that Perl 6 will follow the pattern adopted by many other mainstream languages in terms of the timing of development and publication of a relatively formal and debugged prose specification.[2] This thinking in turn suggests it would be best if the spec docs caught up with the spec test suite and Rakudo and were then polished and formally published in a frozen form, some years from now. At that point making a significant effort to provide practical support for alternate compiler implementations ought once again become compelling. [1] http://www.perl.com/pub/2000/10/23/soto2000.html [2] http://pmichaud.com/2015/pres/fosdem-specs/fosdem-specs-1.pd... |