Comment by kerkeslager

I don't think you're wrong per se. This is a "correct" way of thinking of the situation, but it's not the only correct way and it's arguably not the most useful.

A more useful way to understand the situation is that a language's major implementations are more important than the language itself. If the spec of the language says something, but nobody implements it, you can't write code against the spec. And on the flip side, if the major implementations of a language implement a feature that's not in the spec, you can write code that uses that feature.

A minor historical example of this was Python dictionaries. Maybe a decade ago, the Python spec didn't specify that dictionary keys would be retrieved in insertion order, so in theory, implementations of the Python language could do something like:

  >>> abc = {}
  >>> abc['a'] = 1
  >>> abc['b'] = 2
  >>> abc['c'] = 3
  >>> abc.keys()
  dict_keys(['c', 'a', 'b'])

But the CPython implementation did return all the keys in insertion order, and very few people were using anything other than the CPython implementation, so some codebases started depending on the keys being returned in insertion order without even knowing that they were depending on it. You could say that they weren't writing Python, but that seems a bit pedantic to me.

In any case, Python later standardized that as a feature, so now the ambiguity is solved.

It's all very tricky though, because for example, I wrote some code a decade that used GCC's compare-and-swap extensions, and at least at that time, it didn't compile on Clang. I think you'd have a stronger argument there that I wasn't writing C--not because what I wrote wasn't standard C, but because the code I wrote didn't compile on the most commonly used C compiler. The better approach to communication in this case, I think, is to simply use phrases that communicate what you're doing: instead of saying "C", say "ANSI C", "GCC C", "Portable C", etc.--phrases that communicate what implementations of the language you're supporting. Saying you're writing "C" isn't wrong, it's just not communicating a very important detail: what implementations of the compiler can compile your code. I'm much more interested in effectively communicating what compilers can compile a piece of code than pedantically gatekeeping what's C and what's not.