I've been thinking a bit about model driven development. I think what you say is true, but at a bare minimum the specification should be machine readable.
Take the IRC RFC, for instance. A lot of it is amenable to code generation, but machine-parsing the spec is so hard (I know.. I tried, many moons ago). I feel like a big chunk of that spec could be written in such way that a big part of an IRC client or server could be generated. For other parts, a generator could at least create boilerplate to be filled by a human and maybe some automatic tests.
> but at a bare minimum the specification should be machine readable.
I don't think it's the bare minimum, as an informal specification is far better than none at all, but I agree that a formal specification is better -- at least in the more complicated cases -- as it forces precision and also allows the use of tools that could check it in various ways.
Take the IRC RFC, for instance. A lot of it is amenable to code generation, but machine-parsing the spec is so hard (I know.. I tried, many moons ago). I feel like a big chunk of that spec could be written in such way that a big part of an IRC client or server could be generated. For other parts, a generator could at least create boilerplate to be filled by a human and maybe some automatic tests.