cleanup status

[masinter.PARC@Xerox.COM]

Kent: I composed the following as a follow-up to mail to
common-lisp@sail.stanford.edu. Would this address your concerns?

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My recent message prompted enough debate that I thought I would clarify what I
meant in my recent message about FLET. Some assumptions:

X3J13 is attempting to define an ANSI standard for Common Lisp.
X3J13 is starting with "Common Lisp the Language" by Guy L. Steele, Jr. and
considering various clarifications, changes, additions, enhancements,
modifications.

The "cleanup committee" of X3J13 is considering those minor clarifications,
changes, additions, enhancements, modifications as do not fit within the charter
of the other subcommittee's of X3J13 (namely objects, windows & graphics,
characters, iteration, compilation, validation, and possibly some others that I
forget.)

The process for various cleanups is that we (the cleanup committee) consider
proposals either that we generate (e.g., based on Guy Steele's original list of
proposed modifications), that we get from the community, or are based on mail to
common-lisp@Sail.stanford.edu that seems to have reached some convergence.

We produce a writeup (similar to the one I mailed for FLET-IMPLICIT-BLOCK) for
consideration by X3J13. X3J13 then can vote on a ballot which essentially says
("we believe the ANSI standard for Common Lisp should reflect the following
change/addition/enhancement" etc.)

Until there's an official standard, there isn't an official standard.   Until
there's an official standard, the best an implementor can do is to document the
ways in which the implementation differs from CLtL.

The cleanup proposals, in their various draft forms, are a good indication of
those places where CLtL is ambiguous, lacking, or subject to change; those
cleanup proposals endorsed by X3J13 are a very good indication of what the ANSI
standard will look like. However, the result of the standard process will be a
single standard with (we hope) no options. An implementation will either conform
or it will not. 

They are, of course, not official until there is an official standard that
includes them.

What's it all mean to you?

Well, if you have strong opinions about any of the proposals, make sure your
X3J13 representative hears about them. If you would like some additional
changes, please give them to your X3J13 representative to submit.