Since you have brought up this issue on the thread about governing philosophy (What is the governing philosophy regarding changes to Inform 6?), will you clarify your analysis of this issue with respect to the priority of values that you’ve listed there? Am I correct in thinking (based on your comments in the thread on the compiler site) that you count the current behavior here as a case registering no higher than
Fix code generation bugs where the generated code doesn’t follow the language spec.
and that therefore
Backwards compatibility. If possible, old source code should compile exactly the same game file as before.
takes precedence?
If so, why would this issue not count under
Fix code generation bugs where the generated code doesn’t work at all.
? In this case, the generated code does follow the language specification, but the generated code may not function as expected due to a coincidental interaction between Z-machine number representation/arithmetic and the exact location of the dictionary within Z-machine memory. Given that it is almost certain that no author historically affected by this issue planned on the ambiguous return value problem being present, what is the ostensible value of preserving the status quo of the compiler in this case?