awesome-language-specs

A one-stop shop for everything programming language specifications, references, and test suites.

Why?

I have two reasons for starting this project:

Programming language specifications, espicially older ones, can be painfully hard to find if you aren't "in" on a specific language.
I enjoy fantisizing about implementing a languange and then never actually doing it or stopping early on because something else has caught my fancy.

You on the other hand may find this project useful for a few reasons:

Language specs are hard to find.
Having a bunch of specs in one place makes it easy to study language design.
You can see how the design of a language has changed over time.

What is any of this stuff anyway?

A programming language specification is a lot like a blueprint. It describes a language's design, including syntax, features, and runtime details. It's written by the creators of a programming language so that you can understand how it functions at a low level in order to write an implementation or hack on an existing one. Not all languages have one, but they are extremely useful for compiler and interpreter writers and help to justify a language's existance and design.

A programming language reference acts as a language's manual. It gives the end-user a high-level overview of the language and helps them to learn how to write in it and make good use of its features. Most users of a language will likely reference (heh) the reference and never touch the specification, as the former is much more practical for daily usage of a language. Most programming languages have one; it would be really annoying to learn a language that has no documentation. If you're trying to implement a programming language, it's likely in your best interest to read the reference first before jumping headfirst if you're not already familiar with it.

An implementation is a piece of software which implements (heheh) a specification. Most languages have a model implementation which most users are expected to use and can help implementers get a feel for the architecture of a langauge. Think Python and CPython, or C# and .NET, or Java and Java SE. Some languages, however, don't have a model implementation, like C (GCC, Clang) and JavaScript (SpiderMonkey, V8). Not all implementations follow the spec word-for-word: some are intentionally incomplete, only wanting to maintain a "core" set of features, others extend it, and others still radically change a language just to experiment.

A test suite allows an implementer to test if their implementation functions as the specification intends. They are usually written in the language described by the specification itself and come with a harness which allows one to hook up the test suite to their implementation. Some languages may decide to specify themselves using only a test suite along side a reference.

Notation

This document is generally organized like this:

Major Section (Specs, Implementations, Suites)
- Language Name (alphabetical order)
  - Language Version (reverse chronological order)
    - Links to specfication and other relevant links