> CL was written in a completely different time when there was money to be made selling various bespoke implementations, and therefore there was a big need to v

> CL was written in a completely different time when there was money to be made selling various bespoke implementations, and therefore there was a big need to vagueness in the spec. Today this need is much less so Part of the issue here is that the spec has essentially been abandoned, and frozen for the last almost 30 years. The committee which produced it decided to dissolve itself. If the surviving major commercial vendors and open source implementations thought it was in their interest, they could get together and update the standard for the 21st century, removing a lot of the vagueness and standardising the most widely implemented extensions. ANSI/INCITS is commonly criticised as an overly cumbersome and bureaucratic process, so maybe it would best be done by starting a new bespoke standardisation committee, like what WHAT WG did for HTML. However, I don’t think enough of the major players see it as sufficiently worth their while to invest in, which is why I doubt it will ever actually happen.