Our cat has started coming into the bedroom every morning at 5am, jumping onto the windowsill, and attempting to communicate with the birds that are outside chirping their morning song. She makes a trilling sound that, I suspect, is meant to mimic the birds' calls and lure them in...so that she can catch and eat them.

Fortunately, no birds were harmed in the making of this cuteness.

Is the C standard a formal document? I suggest that no, it is not. Of course, it's written in a formal register, and it certainly strives for precision, but at the end of the day it is prose and in some places ambiguous. That's not a dig, it's just an inherent limitations of using English to define a programming language.

I rather hope that doesn't happen to Rust. What I'd _much_ rather have happen there is to see the language precisely defined by an operational semantics, that is the source of truth. That could be paired with an explanatory reference document that describes those semantics in prose, as accurately as possible. But at least where ambiguity creeps in (as it surely will in prose) there's an accurate and rigorously defined source that one could consult to address those ambiguities precisely.