carbon-lang/proposals/p0162_decision.md

Decision for: Basic Syntax #162

Proposal accepted on 2020-11-10

Affirming:

• austern
• chandlerc
• geoffromer
• gribozavr
• josh11b
• noncombatant
• zygoloid

Abstaining:

• tituswinters

Rationale

Using code to validate our specification is a really promising direction, and this proposal seems like a good starting point. A reference implementation that's simple enough to be part of the design iteration process should help us move faster, by quickly uncovering the places where our specifications are ambiguous, syntactically or semantically unsound, or don't give the behavior we expect. In other words, it will help us keep ourselves honest, even at the proposal stage, which will help us avoid wasting time and effort implementing designs that turn out to be unworkable.

This can be considered as sort of a counterpart to In-progress design overview #83, in that the design specifics are being approved in order to bootstrap the specification process. We aren't necessarily adopting the specific syntax and semantics expressed by this proposal, and those choices will need to be presented and justified from scratch by future proposals.

This decision is deferring the implementation to code review. The specific tooling used to implement the syntax checker, such as Bison, is a detail which may be changed, now or later, without requiring a proposal for core team review.