C99 and C++11 have several compliant implementations, as does ECMAScript 5 (javascript). The benefit of a spec is not so much that all implementations are nece

C99 and C++11 have several compliant implementations, as does ECMAScript 5 (javascript). The benefit of a spec is not so much that all implementations are necessarily completely compliant, it's that you know what the behavior is supposed to be so you can implement to the spec and work around any differences in implementation. Plus, you can report bugs without them being closed as "by design".