It's easy enough to say what's needed, but is it even possible to have that for languages with a potential life span of half a century or more? Back in the ear

It's easy enough to say what's needed, but is it even possible to have that for languages with a potential life span of half a century or more? Back in the early 2000's Camp Smalltalk folks actually came up with a way to have a "toothy" Smalltalk standard, by using homomorphisms. The idea was that to be an official Smalltalk, you didn't have to have exactly X, Y, and Z, but you needed to have something that could map 1-to-1 to X, Y, and Z. The intention was that "standard" Smalltalks would be able to be automatically translated between one another. One of factors why such an exercise was plausible, is the extremely minimalist nature of Smalltalk. C++ is huge. The surface area for standard-breaking problems is partly decided by the size of the language, as well as its age and the number of "vendors." We cannot stop time. It's not certain that limiting "vendors" is all good. We can also choose to minimize the size of the language.