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The music analogy is tempting, but has a serious problem. The same music when interpreted by different people, results in a different sounding piece. There is some level of control on this, but not as much as I think would be necessary for most programs.

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That just means the semantics are not precisely defined. Have a look at the C specification for things that are left undefined. The same C program, when interpreted by different compilers (esp. on different architectures) will have different behavior.

Right. I had thought most folks wanted less "undefined" behavior in a program.

And, most of the type of "undefined" you are referring to are in places where folks are supposed to avoid, right? That is, I thought most were "undefined" and generally considered programmer error.

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