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> There is no such thing as a buggy language. How can you know if you don't have a verified formal description of your language's semantics? It's very much po
by still_grokking 4y ago
> There is no such thing as a buggy language.
How can you know if you don't have a verified formal description of your language's semantics?
It's very much possible (and imho even quite likely) that a lot of language definitions are self contradicting.
Of course one could argue that such self contradictions aren't "bugs" at all. But such an argumentation would seem very odd, imho, no matter one can actually "define" whatever one likes.
- hnfong 4y agohttp://blog.llvm.org/2011/05/what-every-c-programmer-should-know.html http://blog.llvm.org/2011/05/what-every-c-programmer-should-... > Signed integer overflow: If arithmetic on an 'int' type (for example) overflows, the result is undefined. One example is that "INT_MAX+1" is not guaranteed to be INT_MIN. Probably not what the GP meant, but I think this qualifies as a "buggy language (spec)"
- still_grokking 4y agoI don't think defining something as undefined is buggy per se. That's not what I've meant. But defining some things in a contradicting manner would make up a buggy spec, I guess. Regarding the int example, funny enough I made a comment about that just before here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32457056 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32457056