artodeto's blog about coding, politics and the world

http://hhvm.com/blog/5723

The wait is over! We’ve just pushed v1 of the PHP language spec to the repo. The first thing you’ll notice is that it’s in Markdown. Yeah, I know there was a slight lean towards ReStructuredText in my little informal poll, but the guy working on massaging the spec out of MSWord format (JoelM) had enough to deal with that I didn’t want to sideline him too far with bike shedding over document format. I suspect one of the first decisions we’ll make as a group is to pandoc it into something else, and that’s fine. The important thing is to have this starting point.
There are some known issues, which Joel is going to categorize onto bugs.php.net including the fact that PHP currently fails one of the conformance tests because ($a)[0] is a parse error. Speaking of conformance tests, they need some love too. They’re monolithic and scattered with commented out lines of code. Some nice low-hanging fruit for anyone wanting to get involved would be to split them up a bit and clean them to match PHP Coding Conventions.

A final reminder, this is an initial draft, and not a completed documented. As my employer says, "This journey is 1% finished."
Let’s make it awesome.

-Sara

And here is the link to the php specification draft.