Whether it was a mistake is rather a matter of perspective: I'm sure the Microsoft folks didn't think it was wrong. But that aside: I realize that it may not have read that way, but I think what Mono does is an elegant solution to an unfortunate problem so I'm not knocking the approach. For something so fundamental (and obtuse), I just found that it was skirted a little too broadly in the docs that I read (I also searched around mailing lists for a while, where this particular topic seems to have been an intermittent source of confusion over the years).

Nonetheless, thank you for taking the time to address my observation.