Lisp has attempted to standardize (in the sense of writing standards) multiple times: Portable Standard Lisp, Common Lisp, ISLisp, Scheme (RXNS, IEEE Scheme).
There are/were different target communities. Common Lisp addressed the needs of (complex) application developers. Scheme had the both industrial and educational users. ISLisp had slightly different goals.
But what the standard limits is not so much the scope it wants to address, but the application areas with their demands and their capability to pay for it. Stroustrop (and many others) got paid over more than a decade to do standards work.
But back to the original point. I don't think there is a problem to 'standardize' macros or extension languages which use a lot of macros. For the end user a macro is not different from other syntactic constructs, it's just that these syntactic constructs are coming with language updates or with new (embedded) languages. A Java developer learns the Java language and then she needs to learn various XML-based configuration language plus some another extension language. In Lisp this tends to be within one language with syntactical extensions, which share a common language base.
There are/were different target communities. Common Lisp addressed the needs of (complex) application developers. Scheme had the both industrial and educational users. ISLisp had slightly different goals.
But what the standard limits is not so much the scope it wants to address, but the application areas with their demands and their capability to pay for it. Stroustrop (and many others) got paid over more than a decade to do standards work.
The Common Lisp standardization effort also wrote down what they care about: https://www.cs.cmu.edu/Groups/AI/html/cltl/clm/node6.html#SE...
ISLisp also has written down about their scope: http://islisp.info/Documents/PDF/islisp-2007-03-17-pd-v23.pd...
But back to the original point. I don't think there is a problem to 'standardize' macros or extension languages which use a lot of macros. For the end user a macro is not different from other syntactic constructs, it's just that these syntactic constructs are coming with language updates or with new (embedded) languages. A Java developer learns the Java language and then she needs to learn various XML-based configuration language plus some another extension language. In Lisp this tends to be within one language with syntactical extensions, which share a common language base.