[wpietri]

I'm not sure if you're making that argument yourself, but it's thoroughly wrong.

First, there's no "the parser". There are a lot of parsers, some of which don't yet exist.

Second, that means there's no way to distinguish between bugs and features. If the language is defined by parser behavior, then any parser bug is now part of the language.

Third, you've eliminated the white space needed for future growth. If you look at any standard that has evolved well over a period of years, you can see in the early days there was a lot left undefined. If the implementation is the spec, then nothing can be treated as open for change.

[blasdel]

javascript the language itself has a spec that everyone has pretty much always implemented consistently even in the worst throes of the browser wars (the runtime libraries, not so much)

the problem was that jsmin didn't just violate the spec — it's not a javascript implementation at all, but rather a pile of naive textual replacements