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by kibwen 3800 days ago
In fact, C didn't have a specification for the first 17 years of its existence. :)
1 comments

I wouldn't see this as positive.

This fact is the major reason behind the whole undefined behavior story in C and its derived languages.

When the standard came to be, no vendor wanted to give up on the semantics that gave their compiler some kind of advantage.

So all those little issues were tucked into undefined bucket.

Indeed, I'm hoping that Rust begins a push for standardization no later than five years from now, with a formal spec ratified no later than ten (which may sound like a long timeframe, but that would still put it ahead of the average standardization curve). And we're already making a head start on a few necessary aspects of a specification, such as formally proving that our type system is actually as strong as we think it is.