The proposal text seems to imply that “not mandatory” means “the compiler will still compile code that doesn’t conform to the guidelines”. My gut feeling is that “official” will become an unspoken part of the proposal, and after a while people are just going to start calling the recommended guidelines the “official guidelines”. It does not help that many of the voters supporting this proposal are using language like official and mandatory in place of the actual proposal language. It should be updated to specifically emphasize that any such guidelines would be
- default guidelines, not standard guidelines.
- common styling, not recommended styling.
“recommended”, “standard”, and “official” carry v different implications compared to “default” or “common”, and a responsibly-written proposal should make that clear to avoid anything getting ratified de-facto that isn’t in the actual text.