> Well, it's that it allows for compiler implementations that aren't too hard to implement and maintain.

> It allows for a language that's close enough to hardware (and allows you to do programming on a low level), while still offering a reasonable amount of abstraction to be useful (and usable).

I can see the first of these. The second appears to be untrue; if you removed the concept of undefined behavior from C, it wouldn't get farther away from the hardware.

Is that first point actually something that somebody wants? Who benefits from the idea that it's easy to write a "standards-compliant" compiler, because you are technically "standards-compliant" whether you comply with the standard or not?

At that point, you've given up on having a standard, and the interviewers Susam calls out, who say that the correct answer is whatever their compiler says it is, are correct in fact. Susam is the one who's wrong, for reading the standard.

You can run a language that way just fine. I had the impression that Perl was defined by a reference implementation. But it's the opposite of having a standard.