Maybe so, but there's still great value in a normative, comprehensive, practically implementable written specification, whether you choose to call it a "standar

Maybe so, but there's still great value in a normative, comprehensive, practically implementable written specification, whether you choose to call it a "standard" or not. Taking your example, imagine how painful it'd be to write a C# compiler from scratch with the language defined by one of the existing implementations. As just one example of the madness this would entail, see Eric Lippert's "magic zero" "definition" from one version of Microsoft's C# compiler in http://blogs.msdn.com/b/ericlippert/archive/2006/03/29/the-root-of-all-evil-part-two.aspx http://blogs.msdn.com/b/ericlippert/archive/2006/03/29/the-r... where the compile-time literal (8 * (0+(7-7))) implicitly converts to an enumeration type, but (8 * ((7-7)+0)) does not.