Does Elixir have a language specification?-CodePudding

Does Elixir have a language specification document? If yes, where is it?

The Elixir website has library documentation, and I found some documentation on guards and operators, but I did not find a language spec that, for example, documents syntax or provides a list of Elixir keywords (Elixir language keywords, not Keyword lists).

CodePudding user response：

There's no formal specification. Here are some things to look at, that describe the language and might be useful:

Syntax Reference - available only in master docs.
Kernel.SpecialForms - these are the things that are provided "by the language" and cannot be changed - more or less like keywords in other languages. Everything else is macros/functions implemented in Elixir.
Kernel - this module is imported by default and can be viewed as the "base" of the language - everything from here can be locally changed by importing, though.

CodePudding user response：

Syntax Reference is the best place to get specification.

Actually I am looking for atom, but found in spec missing mention this:

These are atom too:

:/
:.

CodePudding user response：

I have just recently switched from Eiffel to Elixir. Eiffel has an outstanding language specification document (see link). This is a BNF-E and is written extremely well. The language is excellent for a 1980s OO, but it is not the power of Elixir by any stretch. Still–the way I became an Eiffel expert was by reading and understanding the language rules (BNF-E specification). It taught me how to "Think like my compiler".

I now want to do the same for Elixir (see here), as I am moving on into this exciting new language system. However, I am finding documentation that is very surface, but nothing that tells me what my choices are from the compilers point of view. To do that, I need to language specification.

The closest I can find so far is found on Github (here), but it is poorly made. I would love to find a company that would be willing to work with me to build such a language specification for Elixir and then a training program built on top of that!