> CLtL2 has 1053 pages if you count the front- and back-matter, 975 if you don't.
Actually CLtL2 is not a book describing the standard, but a book describing a specific state during the standardization. Thus it includes lots of superseded material (plus the reasoning why it was superseded) and also material which was not part of the language (like Series) or later has been removed again (like environment access for macros). Probably (just an estimate) 1/3 of the book is not actual language documentation, but there because this special nature of the book.
Yeah. I quite like the way the second edition was conveyed, though, with additions and amendments indicated by typographic conventions, because the result is that when you have the second edition, you also kinda have the first edition. It's also cool from a historical perspective, since it is very much an intermediate "development snapshot" between CLtL1 and the ANSI standard, and the votes and discussion topics are meticulously catalogued.
But despite CLtL2 not being a standard per se, I think the ANSI standard as published retains a lot of the "spirit" of CLtL, in that it defines things precisely without resorting to obtuse formalisms or overly-dry description, and in that it is organized in a similarly versatile way.
> CLtL2 has 1053 pages if you count the front- and back-matter, 975 if you don't.
Actually CLtL2 is not a book describing the standard, but a book describing a specific state during the standardization. Thus it includes lots of superseded material (plus the reasoning why it was superseded) and also material which was not part of the language (like Series) or later has been removed again (like environment access for macros). Probably (just an estimate) 1/3 of the book is not actual language documentation, but there because this special nature of the book.