Comment by ethin

Wasm is such a cool technology. The spec though for me leaves a lot to be desired. Oh, the first few chapters are fine, but when you get to the binary and text formats that's when it all breaks down for me.

For whatever reason, Wasm loves OCaml. This wouldn't really be a bad thing if they didn't come up with their own custom language to denote syntactic elements of both formats instead of using EBNF or similar. I discussed this with them (because before this change they were using raw MathML for all the productions, and screen readers and MathML are... Erm... Hit and miss) and they noted that they needed an attribute grammar instead of just either BNF or an extension of it. So what they have now (SpecTec) is better than what they did have, and I like that I can now just open the raw grammar files and dive in. The problem is the way they chose to express it. And it could just be me, because ML languages (and functional languages in general) don't really come all that easy to me. (they're just... Really difficult for me to mentally follow, which is odd since I can follow most others just fine.)