[apoorvai]

I'm not really a programming language expert, but it seems to me that having an implementation being the spec wouldn't be a good idea. If the Streem implementation has a bug, then the bug becomes the authoritative behavior. Any platform specific quirks would also make it difficult to have defined behavior.

[ianlevesque]

Yep, welcome to Ruby!

To be fair, a spec with tests was reversed out of the ruby implementation[1], so things have improved a bit.

1. http://rubyspec.org/

[aidenn0]

Implementations are nearly always the spec when a language is young. You want to be able to experiment and make changes. Then as it matures, you typically get a spec.

[skrebbel]

Sure, but this is not finished at all. Starting with the spec instead of a prototype implementation sounds like a very very limiting and unrewarding design process.

[jfoutz]

There's an old argument about worse is better. The gist is, doing things the right way is hard and takes a long time. sometimes, it's better to just get something simple out there and deal with the problems later.

http://www.jwz.org/doc/worse-is-better.html

[Igglyboo]

It looks like a weekends worth of work for Matz, I doubt he's even thinking of a spec at this point.

[dragonwriter]

Right now, the closest thing to a spec is the sample FizzBuzz code (as an implicit spec that "this code will solve FizzBuzz"); there is no implementation (just work-in-progress parser/lexer code.)

So, while I'll agree that there are issues that come from the implementation being the spec of a language in general, I would say we are well earlier than the point at which we can identify that as a problem with Streem.

[xrstf]

Welcome to PHP. The Zend Engine 2 is basically the spec, even though Facebook has recently (couple of weeks ago) started writing a spec to make sure their HHVM is compatible.