What Clean Specs Achieve, WAS: Colonialism, SAX, Java, and Namespaces

[Peter Seibel]

At 09:53 AM 2/6/99 , you wrote:
>Bill la Forge wrote:
>> One of the big advantages of Java is that a small shop can
>> tackle significant projects. With clean specs, the same will
>> be true for XML.
>> 
>
>Hands up, who has read the Java spec (and that's not the same as reading
>the nice clear instructions given to you by the people who wrote the
>compiler)?

I don't know if that was rhetorical or not, but I have. Language Spec and
VM Spec. And I don't develop compilers or VMs for a living -- I'm just a
random Java hacker. FWIW, they are quite readable with most of the problems
of interpretation coming in places that were tacked on as part of the 1.1
release and not part of the spec proper. I'd encourage would-be spec
writers to read the language spec as a example of good spec writing. And
I'd encourage developers -- "average" or otherwise -- to read the specs of
the technologies they use on a daily basis. 

-Peter

-- 
Peter Seibel          Perl/Java/English Hacker      peter at weblogic.com

                     Is Windows98 Y2K compliant? 



xml-dev: A list for W3C XML Developers. To post, mailto:xml-dev at ic.ac.uk
Archived as: http://www.lists.ic.ac.uk/hypermail/xml-dev/ and on CD-ROM/ISBN 981-02-3594-1
To (un)subscribe, mailto:majordomo at ic.ac.uk the following message;
(un)subscribe xml-dev
To subscribe to the digests, mailto:majordomo at ic.ac.uk the following message;
subscribe xml-dev-digest
List coordinator, Henry Rzepa (mailto:rzepa at ic.ac.uk)