Purpose

The purpose of this document is to provide a specification of InPUT. The long-term goal is for InPUT to be the specification of a language-independent tool that can have any number of language-specific implementations.

The first implementation of InPUT (InPUT4j) was also the de facto specification, which was largely implicit in the behavior of the program. Many details were undocumented. The main purpose of this project is to create an explicit and detailed specification that is separate from the implementation.

This benefits users as well as developers. Both should be able to find answers to questions about edge cases. By separating the implementation from the specification, developers of new implementations also have a specification they can reference and claim to support.

Summary

• The specification serves as documentation for users and developers.
• Creating new implementations becomes easier.