Does the spec take priority over the compiler?

[Adam D. Ruppe]

On Sunday, 16 December 2018 at 21:32:50 UTC, Steven Schveighoffer 
wrote:
> the spec says, but the reality is that it would break too much 
> code in a horrible way to make it a reality.

If the spec says it and the code is not compliant, the code is 
*already broken*, by definition, and now the compiler is fixing 
its own bug that allowed invalid.

And I betcha a lot of people would be happy to see their hidden 
bugs now show up as a compile time error.


But that said, it is an embarrassing travesty that we don't have 
impure, @gc, virtual, throws, etc., to invert those things. Those 
NEED to be added ASAP if we want to have any sanity moving 
forward. With them, there is a sane transition/deprecation path 
to this bug fix among many other things, and we can write code 
that works in both cases by specifying either way.

Without them, the attributes suck regardless.