Customary semantics

What is the real, definitive semantics of a language? There are three standard answers:

1. The natural-language specification, because it's the one the designers understand.
2. The reference implementation, because it's unambiguous and well-tested.
3. The formal semantics (of whichever flavor), because it avoids implementation concerns, so it's simpler than a real implementation. (Or because it's difficult and therefore “rigorous”.)

There's a controversial fourth option: the definitive semantics of a language is the behavior that is consistent across all conventional implementations.

This approach has some virtues:

• It identifies the behavior you can rely on. Implementations have bugs and deliberate deviations from the spec, where you can't rely on the specified behaviour. They also have widely supported extensions which you can rely on, even though they're not in the spec.
• Unlike any other means of defining semantics, implementations are heavily tested. Formal semantics can be tested by turning them into implementations, but seldom are; natural-language specifications aren't mechanically tested at all.
• It's reconstructable. Users can always find out what their implementations do, even when the spec is not publicly available, or is difficult to read. (Most specs are.) Sometimes this shows them implementation-dependendent behavior, but by comparing implementations they can discover the customary semantics.

Deferring to custom is unpopular among language designers and theorists. We see it as an ill-defined, unstable foundation about which nothing can be known with confidence, and on which nothing can be built reliably. We remember the chaos that engulfed HTML and CSS and Javascript when their users treated buggy implementations as specs, and we don't want it to happen again. We want our semantic questions to have authoritative answers, and mere custom does not provide that.

But it's the de facto standard among users of languages. Most programmers are not language lawyers, and can't readily figure out whether the spec says their code will work. But they can easily try it and see what happens.

We can tell users not to do this. We can tell them to avoid empiricism, to seek authority rather than evidence, to shut their lying eyes and trust in doctrine. This is not good advice in most areas, not even in other areas of programming, nor for semantics of other languages natural or artificial. Is it really good advice for programming languages?

Whether it's good advice or bad, users don't listen. Their models are based on the behaviour they observe. As a result, many popular “myths” about languages — that is, widely held beliefs that are officially supposed to be false — are true in the customary semantics. For example, here are some parts of C's customary semantics that are not part of the formal specification. Some of them are violated on unusual architectures, but most C users have never written for such an architecture, so custom doesn't care.

• Signed integers are represented in two's complement. (Rumor has it this is not quite always true.)
• Signed integer overflow is modulo word size, like unsigned.
• All pointer types have the same representation: an integer.
• NULL is represented as 0.
• Memory is flat: it's all accessible by pointer arithmetic from any pointer.
• Pointer arithmetic is always defined, even outside array bounds. Overflow is modulo word size, just like integers.
• Dereferencing an invalid pointer, such as NULL or an out-of-bounds pointer, blindly tries to use the address.
• Compilers generate native code. The built-in operators compile to machine instructions.
• char is exactly eight bits wide.
• Characters are represented in a superset of ASCII.

(I thought sizeof(char) == 1 was only in the customary semantics, but it's actually in the spec.)

Much of the furor over optimizations that exploit undefined behaviour is because they're invalid in the customary semantics. Some C compiler maintainers have come to believe that the spec is the whole of the contract between compilers and users, and thus that users don't care about semantics not defined therein. It's a convenient belief, since it permits optimizations that would otherwise be impossible, but it's wildly at odds with what their users want. This isn't the only problem with these optimizations — they make for perverse error behaviour under any semantics — but this is why users tend to see them as not merely bad but incorrect.

Language lawyers, especially those who write specs, should take customary semantics more seriously, so they don't contradict the semantics in actual use.