It's a curious situation for sure. QBasic shares the property that you can run decades old code unmodified, but we don't celebrate that language. I think a cert

It's a curious situation for sure. QBasic shares the property that you can run decades old code unmodified, but we don't celebrate that language. I think a certain amount of resistance to updating it must also come from looking at other languages that have no spec whatsoever (not even an old one) and are doing or have done just fine. Then you look at the various problems that would be addressed by an ANSI update, and see that so many of them are resolved with libraries that work across implementations, some bundled OOTB with implementations, and easy to get via quicklisp if not. And as you bring up, though there's not a standard for hash literals, which aesthetically sucks, you still have a gorillion choices you can import including writing your own in a few lines to fit your aesthetics if you can't stand the alists. Lisp is powerful enough to support such flexible choices without a headache. A serious effort would probably benefit from talking to the C++ people. Since my knowledge of C++ is basically stuck at C++98 + a few Boost utils, my outside perspective is that C++0x and eventually C++11-C++17 were just standardizing what were already halfway de-facto standards in Boost (halfway because you could get a lot of questionable looks for including Boost from some parts of the community, and the limitations of C++ meant some things didn't look or debug as nice as if there were compiler support). Still, with the standard the syntax has grown quite a bit and some of it can be more pleasing than the Boost macros. Did it break anyone? Probably, but at least compilers let them compile with old standards. It'd be a good conversation with C++ committee people especially to see what it took to finally update such an old spec. A CL update would surely need a similar feature of running under the old spec, since e.g. if you're adding literal hash table support you're almost surely going to break someone who was using that syntax choice for something else.