> Or think how ridiculous it sounds to think of a "standard" definition of Python or Ruby. There are ongoing efforts to standardize a quite sizable subset of R

> Or think how ridiculous it sounds to think of a "standard" definition of Python or Ruby. There are ongoing efforts to standardize a quite sizable subset of Ruby in Japan for later ratifications in ISO. Ruby is also de facto standardized by the test-suite RubySpec. It is not ridiculous at all, in fact reference documents such as RubySpec have been one of the main reason for which you can move from a Ruby implementation to another without many issues and without having many compatibility hacks included in each compiler/interpreter.