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It appears to be a fork of the compiler not the language itself.

I don't know much about Scala but I believe that most of its facilities are in the libraries rather than the language itself.

Since he seems to know more about compiling Scala than everyone else I guess it must be a good thing. Lets hope others get to fill the inevitable gaps.

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> It appears to be a fork of the compiler not the language itself.

They are the same thing. There is no spec for Scala (no recent one anyway) so the specification is the Scala compiler. And based on everything that Paul has been saying these past months, the compiler is very close to being unmaintainable.

There actually is a recent spec, although I'm not sure if it still needs some updating. http://www.scala-lang.org/files/archive/spec/2.11/

There is "a spec" yes. Now let's see someone implement a compatible implementation based on that. We're not talking about fiddling at the boundaries here. For instance type inference is completely unspecified. There is no aspect of scala compilation which is not heavily influenced by how type inference unfolds, yet there is nothing. And that is the tip of the iceberg.

If you're always hearing about how amazingly small scala's specification is, now you know why.

He started on his own standard library a while ago:

https://github.com/paulp/psp-std

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