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<i>"From what I hear about C99 and the C++0x standardization process, designing a language is very, very difficult and time-consuming."</i>
Yup. Though it's amusing how many people manage to randomly do it on-line without nearly as much time or effort.
The big difference between them and what standards bodies are trying to do is that most people spell out what their implementation does, but not what the language guarantees. You're probably familiar with the same distinction from designing libraries -- "if you do this, the behavior is undefined", even though your library may always do the same thing in response to that. You just don't want to guarantee it forever, or in all circumstances.
Plus, of course, the standards bodies are dealing with established languages and so they have to deal with implementation issues a lot more carefully than most, and they usually need to do so without taking the time to actually implement the changes they mention. A difficult job, that. Particularly in C++ where different compilers still do genuinely different things to implement certain features, so it can be hard to tell if you're breaking something that somebody's doing.
A decent C++ ABI (Application Binary Interface) would solve a lot of that problem, but that's been "just about to happen" for ten years and counting so I'm not holding my breath.
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