4 ms·
I disagree, a language is merely a standard defined by reference documentation and sometimes certified by ANSI and the like. The fact that things are documented
by 0xDEEPFAC 8y ago
I disagree, a language is merely a standard defined by reference documentation and sometimes certified by ANSI and the like. The fact that things are documented means thought has been put into the design, but... yea unimplemented things should be labeled
- ModernMech 8y agoI think it used to be the case that a language and it's implementation were considered separate things. Today it seems like they are conflated to the point where people take the position that if it's not implemented, it's not actually a language. This view discounts the great languages of the past that were never implemented due to platform immaturity.
- pushpop 8y agoI think the issue was more that languages often used to have multiple implementations which differed and no real standard beyond the de facto (whichever was most commonly used). You saw this with the variations of BASIC on the micro computers, the different Pascal and C compilers of the 70s and 80s etc. But even back then, languages without a compiler were still nothing more than an academic exercise which entertained a comparatively few of the overall engineers around at that time. So I don’t think much has changed in that regard aside the expectation that a language should now have a reference implementation. And even then that’s not always the case (eg Perl 6).