I think the author meant this to be a bit tongue in cheek, but if one were to take this seriously, there would be much to criticize about the approach. One big

I think the author meant this to be a bit tongue in cheek, but if one were to take this seriously, there would be much to criticize about the approach. One big concern I'd have, for instance, is to rely on the standards as reflecting Wirth's state of mind in the design of a language. This is a questionable idea for almost any programming language, as the standard represents an endpoint in the design process, rather than the starting point. It's even more questionable for Wirth designed languages, as he was not very involved in the standardization efforts. By the time Pascal was standardized, he had moved on to Modula-2 which he thought had superior solutions to many of the design flaws in Pascal, so he had little use for standardized Pascal. Furthermore, the languages themselves had quite a bit of evolution over their lifetimes. Wirth and his team were very involved in systems design and compiler construction, Wirth was a big advocate for simplicity, and that philosophy included co-evolving the programming language along with the system. Every now and then he decided that some particular feature was more trouble to implement in a new compiler than it really was worth in practice, so he simply changed the language spec.