The specification is the test suite. (Which has been kept up to date.) A text specification like the one C has is bordering on useless. There are plenty of thi

The specification is the test suite. (Which has been kept up to date.) A text specification like the one C has is bordering on useless. There are plenty of things that are “implementation defined”. I think it was C that had to resort to saying that new features wouldn't be added to the specification until at least one implementation supported it, because it turned out some of the new features were impossible. The thing that cygx was referring to were the Apocalypses, Exegesis, and Synopsys. They were never intended to be a specification as such. They were more of a way of talking about and thinking about the intended features and how they might look. At no point did anyone try to turn them into something more resembling a text specification. I would like to point out that they had a lot of inconsistencies. There were features in one that weren't possible without breaking features from another. Things which weren't found until there was a test-suite. Which is precisely why we don't have a text specification like C, we have a test-suite as the specification. It certainly makes it easier to determine if an implementation follows the specification.