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. - : send the line "unsubscribe linux-scsi" in the body of a message to majordomo@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx More majordomo info at http://vger.kernel.org/majordomo-info.html
