[ANSI-Smalltalk] Editing and executable specification

[Martin McClure]

Bruce Badger wrote:

> It's looking like we'll be building the text of the standard in the
> project wiki which Paolo is providing.  As the bits or work are carved
> up I would expect the people working on a topic to put together the
> text for that topic.  For example, John O'Keefe is leading the errata
> effort.
> 
> Of course we will need to make sure that the work is consistent in
> style as well as content, so having someone keep an overall eye on
> things would be great!  Is that the kind of thing you had in mind?

Basically, yes. Consistent style, final assembly, and such.


As far as the content goes, I don't think plain text is necessarily a 
good format for specifying the standard. The final standard will be in 
styled text, but it may be better to mechanically generate this text. 
The 1998 standard has a *lot* of repetitive structure that, if done by a 
human, is both a lot of work and quite prone to error.

If instead we had a way to generate the text from an annotated reference 
implementation (written in itself, so any ANSI-compliant Smalltalk could 
execute the specification), we could reason about the spec in a form I 
expect we all find more convenient than text: A browser.

We'd be able to write tests to check the spec for consistency, changing 
descriptive text in one place in the executable spec would automatically 
change it all the places it needed to be changed in the standard, and so 
on.

I haven't seen a system that does precisely this, but I'm sure there are 
things like it out there, and it doesn't look too difficult to implement 
even if it had to be done from scratch.

Regards,

-Martin