John Leslie wrote:
I'm pretty darn uncomfortable _ever_ picking a fight with any
sitting AD, But I feel obligated to say this seems like a terrible
idea to me.
As a background, I'm a long-time believer in "rough consensus" for
Proposed Standard and "running code" for advancement along the
standards track. I do not believe the two mix well.
I don't have the resource to participate the discussion, but
these statements capture my opinion pretty well.
I also believe that the existence of "running code" would be a terrible
excuse for not resolving technical objections.
While implementing a spec can help finding inconsitencies and ambiguities
in a spec, infering the reverse when the implementation is *NOT*
created as a by-product of a formal correctness proofing tool for the
spec does not hold.
Weird implementations that are incompliant with a spec, or that ignore
rather than recognize and report defects in a spec are extremely common.
And if the sequence of events is, that an implementation is created first,
and then producing a spec describing the alleged implementation behaviour,
is going to result in lots of surprises about the frequent lack of
correctness of both, the spec and the implementation it is based upon.
-Martin