>Depending on the context they can be an ergonomic nice-to-have, but it’s not like you can’t express a program without them.

When talking about turing complete languages, everything is an ergonomic nice-to-have. All language features aspire to be so nice to have, that you come back around and call it a necessity. But you can still express a program without them, unless you strip out so much as to lose turing completeness.

Right, which is why "requirement" is a silly framing that ascribes a sort of objective engineering necessity embedded in the problem to what is actually an subjective aesthetic choice between solutions.

(I'm generally pretty skeptical of the whole "write down your requirements with no awareness of available solutions and then choose a solution that meets them" approach to decision-making).

Why do you find it strange? To me, "requirement" signals that there's some sort of pain threshold for writing/maintaining code that the writer isn't willing to go above. Is there anything weird in that?

> (I'm generally pretty skeptical of the whole "write down your requirements with no awareness of available solutions and then choose a solution that meets them" approach to decision-making).

I also don't understand this. If there's a solution that meets all of the requirements what does it matter what there are other solutions? I mean, yeah, you be doing a local vs. global optimization, but as long it meets the requirements it's probably not a big deal. (The only exception is if the requirements are so broad as to be meaningless, but as long as they're reasonably specific, I don't see the problem.)

A language with only goto and call statements can express any program, too. It's not unreasonable to require higher level programming constructs, because such make programming faster and less prone to error.

If you have a half million codebase that you need to migrate, I would say that every heavily used Extended Pascal feature is required to be easily translatable. If it's simply possible but the translation is not direct or easy, then the maintainers may be better off staying with Ext Pascal than maintaing a half million uglified code base.