Unpopular opinion: What it means for a language to “have a spec” is so ambiguous as to be meaningless in practice.
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We’d feel guilty for accepting anything less than a full operational semantics as a spec, but in reality what people want specs for is to tick the box that says “this language has a spec”, not to actually *do* anything with the spec.
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People read specs to learn the language, to try implementing independently and then interop-testing, to settle disputes among impls. These have some value.
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