[pklausler]

A language standard without a reference implementation or blessed test suite can be a real problem due to ambiguity, contradiction, and omissions. When there are existing implementations of a language that are expected to keep up with an evolving standard that doesn't have these things, you can end up with a messy situation like Fortran has, in which the portability of code across compilers becomes a pragmatic job that's not related much to standard conformance.