Opera moves to WebKit and V8

Posted Feb 19, 2013 3:47 UTC (Tue) by rgmoore (✭ supporter ✭, #75)
In reply to: Opera moves to WebKit and V8 by khim
Parent article: Opera moves to WebKit and V8

If you have just one implementation then interoperability is achieved automatically.

Not really. Fred Brooks goes into some detail of the drawbacks of implementation as specification in The Mythical Man-Month. The problem is that you never have just one implementation. Every version is a subtly different implementation from the previous version. If you define the implementation to be the specification, there are no such things as bugs. Every quirk of your implementation is part of the API, and any attempt to fix what you see as bugs may turn out to be eliminating a feature that somebody has come to depend on. Even if you have just one implementation, it can still be useful to have a formal specification to prevent yourself from getting stuck with that kind of problem.