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4 points by shiro 6124 days ago | link | parent

Implementation can be, and will be, changed, inevitably. Then does the language change as well, or the languages remains the same but just implementation is improved? How can you tell the difference purely from the source?

Some Scheme implementation evaluates arguments left to right. You can see that by reading the source. In future, it may switch it right to left, maybe for better optimization. The spec in natural language, or more formal and abstract form like in Appendix A of R6RS, can explicitly say the order of evaluation is unspecified. How you tell your users that they should not rely on the evaluation order purely by the source code, given the state of most programming languages?

Ideally I like to think the source only describes the spec and the compiler and runtime figure out the details, so maybe spec-by-source and spec-by-other-notation will converge in future. Is that what you are talking?

(Please don't argue that unspecified evaluation order is bad or not; I just use that example to illustrate the point. And incidentally, since Arc is defined in terms of Scheme, the order of argument evaluation order is just unspecified as well. But it's just delegating the spec to a lower level.)



1 point by soegaard 6123 days ago | link

Actually PLT Scheme guarantees left-to-right order, but that doesn't change your point.

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