Specs on Spec
=============

This is a collection of specifications for programming languages that have
not been implemented.  Indeed, many of them may well be unimplementable.

Most of them were designed, and their specs written, by Chris Pressey of
Cat's Eye Technologies; the exceptions are:

*   **Startre** and **\*W**, which were designed and written by
    John Colagioia; and
*   **TURKEY BOMB**, which (I baldly assert) was found unexpectedly one
    day under a stack of _Byte_ magazines at a charity shop.

Also, I say "programming language", but of course that term is rather flexible
'round these parts:

*   **Madison** is a language for writing formal proofs;
*   **MDPN** is a (two-dimensional) parser-definition language; and
*   **Opus-2** is a "spoken" language, for some rather exceptional meaning of
    "speaking".

Most of these specifications are "finished" in the sense that there is nothing
obviously more to add to them.  (Of course, an implementation, or some really
brow-furrowing thought experiments, could always turn up problems with a
specification.)  The exceptions, which can be considered "works in progress",
are:
    
*   **Irishsea**, which is largely a set of notes for a livecoding language.
*   **Sampo**, which is largely a set of notes for a production language.

The specification documents are copyrighted by their respective authors.  Not
that I mind if you fork this repo and submit pull requests to fix errors or
the like, for such is the nature of the distributed version control beast.

Note on the name: in the dialect of English where I come from, "spec" is short
for "specification" but "on spec" is short for "on *speculation*."  Thus the
name is trying to convey the idea of specifications that were just kind of
pulled out of the air.