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One of the reasons why manufacturers don't like to give fully formal specifications (they have them) to programmers is to avoid legal action if they change the

• solarexplorer 12y ago
  You mean manufacturers want to avoid legal action when they break their own specs? They already did, the paper contains an example. The point of an architecture specification is not to dictate a specific hardware implementation, but to establish a contract between hardware and software. When both parts comply, then the new implementation of a chip will run the old software without problems. A _formal_ specification is just a better contract. Of course it limits future implementation options, but if you want to stay backward compatible, you are limited anyway.