From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 X-Spam-Checker-Version: SpamAssassin 3.4.4 (2020-01-24) on polar.synack.me X-Spam-Level: X-Spam-Status: No, score=-0.9 required=5.0 tests=BAYES_00,FORGED_GMAIL_RCVD, FREEMAIL_FROM autolearn=no autolearn_force=no version=3.4.4 X-Google-Thread: 103376,3a1c64628a09855b X-Google-Attributes: gid103376,domainid0,public,usenet X-Google-Language: ENGLISH,ASCII-7-bit Path: g2news1.google.com!postnews.google.com!q1g2000prf.googlegroups.com!not-for-mail From: Eric Hughes Newsgroups: comp.lang.ada Subject: Re: Lack of formal syntax undermines Ada Date: Tue, 15 Apr 2008 20:14:45 -0700 (PDT) Organization: http://groups.google.com Message-ID: <83992c90-4307-4969-a352-fbb8b64c34e8@q1g2000prf.googlegroups.com> References: <47ff4970$0$19809$4d3efbfe@news.sover.net> <0d5b2ee5-56e7-446f-b29c-564580263c3e@i36g2000prf.googlegroups.com> <480563cc$0$19822$4d3efbfe@news.sover.net> NNTP-Posting-Host: 166.70.57.218 Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=ISO-8859-1 Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit X-Trace: posting.google.com 1208315685 4345 127.0.0.1 (16 Apr 2008 03:14:45 GMT) X-Complaints-To: groups-abuse@google.com NNTP-Posting-Date: Wed, 16 Apr 2008 03:14:45 +0000 (UTC) Complaints-To: groups-abuse@google.com Injection-Info: q1g2000prf.googlegroups.com; posting-host=166.70.57.218; posting-account=5RIiTwoAAACt_Eu87gmPAJMoMTeMz-rn User-Agent: G2/1.0 X-HTTP-UserAgent: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; en-US; rv:1.8.1.13) Gecko/20080311 Firefox/2.0.0.13,gzip(gfe),gzip(gfe) Xref: g2news1.google.com comp.lang.ada:20971 Date: 2008-04-15T20:14:45-07:00 List-Id: On Apr 15, 8:26 pm, "Peter C. Chapin" wrote: > One could > argue that we really should write language standards in some kind of > formal specification language like Z. However, doing so would make the > standard inaccessible to a vast majority of programmers. Why pick? Have both. Make the formal standard normative, the human language expository, and fix defects in the standard and defects in the exposition separately. Eric