On Mon, Oct 03, 2005 at 03:56:50PM -0700, Linus Torvalds wrote:
> For example, Al Viro pointed out privately that the C preprocessor spec
> actually matches what a C preprocessor is supposed to do, and that it was
> easy to generate code from the spec. The reason? The code existed first,
> the spec was written from that. Writing it back into software "just
> works", because the spec really _was_ software to begin with, just
> re-written as a spec.
Not quite, AFAIK. Existing code was a fscking mess of subtly incompatible
implementations; the thing that had helped was simple - the people who
would have to implement the damn thing had a lot of presense in the
committee. So it boiled down to
* observation: attempt to describe it as text transformation leads
to horrors; it really acts on token stream; give up treating it like a text
filter.
* after figuring out what it should do to sequences of tokens they
ended up with a reasonably simple algorithm that matched the existing
behaviour sans the nasty corner cases everyone handled differently.
* _that_ had been turned into spec.
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