Re:Who Says C is Simple?
by ctdonath on Wednesday July 17, 2013 @11:26PM
(#6061614)
The size of the spec in part reflects the intensity and vastness of real world usage, having to get into painstaking detail regarding otherwise ignorable issues. It agonizes over minutiae because enough people are going into those dark corners that rules and expectations must be laid out for a profusion of obscurities.
If you have a relatively small number of users who understand the gist of the language, it can be expressed in a few pages.
If you want the language to be useful beyond a trivial description, you'll have to add some complexity, which leads to weaknesses.
If your language becomes world-scale popular, you're going to have to spend specification space dealing with things like explaining that under certain conditions yes in fact a Boolean variable can have a value other than "true" or "false".
If you have a relatively small number of users who understand the gist of the language, it can be expressed in a few pages.
If you want the language to be useful beyond a trivial description, you'll have to add some complexity, which leads to weaknesses.
If your language becomes world-scale popular, you're going to have to spend specification space dealing with things like explaining that under certain conditions yes in fact a Boolean variable can have a value other than "true" or "false".