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> You can not really write a formal spec without having prose first.

The WebAssembly folks might have done that? From the Wasm SpecTec blog post I linked in a sister comment (emphasis in original):

> In fact, the formal version [of the Wasm spec] was written long before the prose, which was then created by manually transliterating the formal rules into natural language (for some definition of “natural”).

To be fair, I'm sure there was a lot of non-formal discussion in the process of creating the formal spec but I'm not sure whether that counts as "prose" in this context.



It is also clear that you can write a formal spec down before writing down prose, if your language is simple and low-level enough.




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