I think you&#x27;ve misunderstood the original intent as expressed by Larry Wall in 2000, the current situation, and the future intent and practical realities.<p>For the original intent I&#x27;ll quote Larry from the day he announced Perl 6 in 2000[1]:<p>&quot;I don&#x27;t know how strict a spec it will be from the language design point of view. I&#x27;m not really big on that sort of spec and there is some value to using the reference implementation approach and what we currently have is a reference implementation [with] no second implementation, well, unless you count the JVM work, but, obviously there are benefits to having things justified well enough that you could implement another one even if you didn&#x27;t want to, so we&#x27;ll definitely be working in that direction and - do you have something? And there was something else I was going to say - what we particularly want to stress in terms of - is not perhaps so much the spec as developing our current regression test. Well, we call them regression tests, but they&#x27;re almost more acceptance tests, but, we developed our acceptance into real regression tests then you&#x27;d further develop the real regression tests into a validation test of what the language actually means and actually go out and explore all the nooks and crannies and say, &quot;This is Perl, this is not Perl,&quot; and then we actually have a machine-readable spec. And to me that&#x27;s actually a lot more important than what the verbiage on the human readable thing says.&quot;<p>I think the 6.Christmas release corresponds fairly directly to this original intent.<p>In the meantime the spec docs (as against the spec test suite), which are currently referred to as either &quot;speculations&quot; or &quot;design docs&quot; to better emphasize their contemporary role, are currently well behind the test suite and implementation. This is presumably what caught your attention.<p>The current thinking is that Perl 6 will follow the pattern adopted by many other mainstream languages in terms of the timing of development and publication of a relatively formal and debugged prose specification.[2]<p>This thinking in turn suggests it would be best if the spec docs caught up with the spec test suite and Rakudo and were then polished and formally published in a frozen form, some years from now.<p>At that point making a significant effort to provide practical support for alternate compiler implementations ought once again become compelling.<p>[1] <a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.perl.com&#x2F;pub&#x2F;2000&#x2F;10&#x2F;23&#x2F;soto2000.html" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.perl.com&#x2F;pub&#x2F;2000&#x2F;10&#x2F;23&#x2F;soto2000.html</a><p>[2] <a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;pmichaud.com&#x2F;2015&#x2F;pres&#x2F;fosdem-specs&#x2F;fosdem-specs-1.pdf" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;pmichaud.com&#x2F;2015&#x2F;pres&#x2F;fosdem-specs&#x2F;fosdem-specs-1.pd...</a>