Implementation-defined vs. Implementation-dependent

[Patrick Durusau <patrick@durusau.net>]

Greetings!

While entering the flurry of corrections/additions, there are cases 
where we use the terms:

implementation-defined

and

implementation-dependent

Just want to make sure we have agreement on the meaning of those terms.

Suggest for addition to Part 2 (I suspect we need this for part 1 as 
well and so this may not be entirely our call):

implementation-defined: A conforming evaluator shall document its 
behavior with regard to any behavior that is defined in Part 2 as 
implementation-defined.

implementation-dependent: A conforming evaluation may document its 
behavior with regard to any behavior that is defined in part 2 as 
implementation-dependent, but behavior may vary from evaluator to 
evaluator without warning.

The first and stronger clause making conformance dependence upon 
documenting the choices of the evaluator.

The second doesn't prevent implementation dependent behavior from being 
documented, but we don't require it.

I don't know that we need to go any further in terms of saying what sort 
of documentation is required, at least at this point.

Hope everyone is having a great week!

Patrick

-- 
Patrick Durusau
patrick@durusau.net
Chair, V1 - US TAG to JTC 1/SC 34
Convener, JTC 1/SC 34/WG 3 (Topic Maps)
Editor, OpenDocument Format TC (OASIS), Project Editor ISO/IEC 26300
Co-Editor, ISO/IEC 13250-1, 13250-5 (Topic Maps)