What's implementation defined?

[Doug Gwyn]

In article <229 at twwells.uucp> bill at twwells.UUCP (T. William Wells) writes:
-In article <1988Nov28.215053.3129 at utzoo.uucp> henry at utzoo.uucp (Henry Spencer) writes:
-: No; what we have here is a situation in which the legality of such a
-: program is implementation-defined.  It is not improper to fail to translate
-: an illegal program.
-Since this kind of thing occurs throughout the standard, I'm forced
-to conclude that they intended that some things can be implementation
-defined to be incorrect, regardless of the stated definition of
-"implementation defined".

This is a misreading of the proposed standard.  "Implementation defined"
does not give license to fail to translate the program.  See the final
Rationale document.