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0 pointsMarkusQ1y ago0 comments

Which would be relevant if either side respected it.

In practice, compilers frequently have bugs and programmers even more frequently make use of "what the compiler actually does" rather than adhering to the language specification -- to the point where the de facto spec for many languages is "what the canonical implementation does".

And the specifications change over time.

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kibwen1y ago

The frequency with which compiler implementations functionally diverge from language specifications is dwarfed, by many orders of magnitude, by the frequency with which LLMs generate provably nonsensical code in response to a prompt.

To wit, a compiler diverging from the specification is so relatively rare that people will get angry about it and demand that it be fixed, while an LLM spewing creative nonsense is so accepted and par for the course that complaining about that fact is met with a shrug and "well, what did you expect?"

layer81y ago

LLMs don’t have a canonical output that could serve as a specification. And if they had, we wouldn’t consider that a satisfactory specification at all.

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