Nondeterminism's Not the Problem

Krssst

Fully agree with the article (as my comment history would attest). I wonder why people worry so much more about "determinism" over conformance to a spec. (a compiler can be nondeterministic and correct which is not particularly good but definitely not worse than being incorrect) Maybe most devs don't care so much about the language specification and just expect the code to do vaguely what it looks it should do intuitively? This is not very clear to me, at least for libraries I guess a lot of people don't read API docs and just call the API hoping it does what the name says (preconditions be damned) in which case nondeterminisc observable behavior would be more problematic than nonconformance to a spec (API doc) they don't read.

peterlk

Any sufficiently specified prompt is indistinguishable from code