[erlang-questions] On OTP rand module difference between OTP 19 and OTP 20

[Jesper Louis Andersen]

On Thu, Aug 31, 2017 at 3:42 PM Loïc Hoguin <essen@REDACTED> wrote:

>
> I certainly hope this is not the general policy for OTP. We program
> against the documentation. The documentation *is* our reality.
>
>
I think it is fair to evaluate on a case by case basis. Some times, the
documentation and the implementation are not matching up. This means either
the documentation or the implementation is wrong (not xor here!). Which of
which is wrong depends a bit on the case, and there are definitely
borderline situations where it is very hard to determine which way you
should let the thing fall.

I don't think you can make blanket statements on which way you should lean
because there are good counterexamples in both "camps" so to speak.

Another view is that the documentation is the specification. But again,
both the specification and the implementation can be wrong and some times
the correct operation is to change the specification. When I worked with
formal semantics, it was quite common that you altered the specification in
ways that let you prove a meta-theoretic property about the specification.
Not altering it would simply make the proof way to complicated and hard.
Perhaps even impossible. It is an extreme variant of letting the
documentation match the reality in a certain sense.
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