3 ms·

Or, you know, allow multiple implementations without someone having to reverse-engineer what's meant to happen in edge cases from the reference implementation..

• fulafel 10y ago
  In PL context standard usually implies a committee design, whereas language specification is used to mean an engineered formal definition to define semantics. I agree having a spec without the committee design is a mostly good thing. Though there's a good argument for just blessing the most popular implementation as "the spec". Paper specs have bugs too, and they always live in a kind of shadow world vs real life. Things that aren't theoretically specified are relied upon in real life. See eg the Java and C standards. In Java's case nobody cares what the standard is, all implementations just have to be Sun compatible realistically. In C's case it's really opened a world of hurt with all the undefined behaviour and resulting security problems etc.