On Nov 4, 2013, at 1:01 PM, Dave Cridland <dave(_at_)cridland(_dot_)net> wrote:
What Larry is saying - or at least, what I'm agreeing with, regardless of
whether Larry meant this or not - is that if you've a bunch of people saying
"I've implemented this in production, and X needs to be Y", then that is a
very hard argument to beat.
Historically we haven't just blessed existing implementations if there were
things that needed to be fixed. This interpretation of "running code" is a
bit problematic because people with running code have a vested interest in the
spec not changing. Not always a bad thing, but it can be quite harmful.