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Python doesn't have a spec. It barely even has documentation nowadays. (Sad. Twenty five years ago it was the gold standard of documenting software.)
by otabdeveloper4 1y ago
Python doesn't have a spec.
It barely even has documentation nowadays. (Sad. Twenty five years ago it was the gold standard of documenting software.)
- troupo 1y ago> Twenty five years ago it was the gold standard of documenting software. That was PHP. Though Python was a close second
- LPisGood 1y agoI don’t understand what you mean by “doesn’t have a spec” The existence of Pypy and CPython and separate but compatible entities shows that there is
- motorest 1y agoCPython is the de-facto reference implementation of Python. Pypy was developed by reverse engineering CPython and their automated tests feature explicit comparisons with CPyton. You made the opposite point you thought you were making.
- librasteve 1y agoin raku, the test suite (ROAST) is the spec any compiler that can pass ROAST is valid
- simonw 1y agohttps://docs.python.org/3/reference/grammar.html https://docs.python.org/3/reference/grammar.html and https://docs.python.org/3/reference/index.html https://docs.python.org/3/reference/index.html look pretty comprehensive to me, and they're backed up by a thorough collection of PEPs: https://peps.python.org/pep-0000/ https://peps.python.org/pep-0000/ As a relatively recent example, here's the language reference documentation for the match statement https://docs.python.org/3/reference/compound_stmts.html#the-match-statement https://docs.python.org/3/reference/compound_stmts.html#the-...
- NeutralForest 1y agoThat seems uncalled for, the docs are great and the various guides are usually a good starting point to understand and then use the stdlib.
- zahlman 1y agoPython's documentation today[1] is clearly more expansive, better formatted and more readily comprehensible than its documentation from 2001[2] (or even 2008[3]). There are multiple entire sections of documentation now that didn't exist before. Standards were just lower back then, partly because a larger percentage of "programmers" were accustomed to wrestling with beasts like C, and partly because systems were much smaller. https://docs.python.org/3/ https://docs.python.org/3/ https://docs.python.org/2.0/ https://docs.python.org/2.0/ https://docs.python.org/2.5/ https://docs.python.org/2.5/
- motorest 1y ago> Python's documentation today[1] is clearly more expansive, better formatted and more readily comprehensible than its documentation from 2001[2] (or even 2008[3]). Documentation is not a specification. Specifications cover all behavior that should be expected, and specify which behavior is implementation-defined or undefined. If something isn't defined them this is a failure in the specification that requires fixing. The point of a specification is to allow independent parties to do clean room implementations that can be used interchangeably.
- zahlman 1y agoThe majority of the comment I was replying to was about documentation, and I was responding to that.
- otabdeveloper4 1y agoGood documentation cannot be "expansive". Good documentation must be a) thorough and b) minimal. Modern Python documentation is absolutely horrible - there's a shitload of irrelevant rambling while absolutely crucial details are omitted.