Annex A of 5th Edition

[Allen Wirfs-Brock]

On Sep 6, 2012, at 10:19 PM, Joseph Spencer wrote:

> Would it not be beneficial to bring Annex A into greater conformity with
> the rest of the spec at this point?  
> 
> Such changes seem relatively safe (to a noobie that is ;), as any code
> produced moving forward by devs would still parse just fine under older
> implementations that allowed for the unwanted syntax.  It seems that
> doing so would also bring the ecosystem of implementations into greater
> alignment moving forward.
> 

Annex A is just a informative summary of the normative BNF that is scattered through-out the rest of the document, so I think what you are really suggesting that w try to express more of the static semantics using the normative grammar.  For the ES6 spec. I'm actually going in a different direction which is more algorithmic specification of the static semantic restrictions on syntactically valid programs.  Many of these restrictions concern non-local feature interactions that are difficult or impossible to express purely using a non-attributed BNF.  If you haven't already, you should take a look at the ES6 draft http://wiki.ecmascript.org/doku.php?id=harmony:specification_drafts 

Just this morning, I wrote static semantic rules that cover the Postfix and PrefixExpression (and other assignment contexts) that you had noted.

Allen


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