Gotcha. Broadly agreed then (Java is a very good counter-example), though I think pypy might be succeeding quite a bit more than org-mode in terms of users... and org-mode doesn't have a language spec either afaict. It has a fairly good description of the current code's parsing behavior, but the closest I've seen to something rigorous is https://github.com/200ok-ch/org-parser and even that's still unfinished from the readme (and it seems probably abandoned).

I haven't looked into the actual current state of things though, my last check was a couple years ago. I'd be pretty happy if things have changed, I just haven't seen any sign of that.