Misc

["Scott E. Fahlman" <Fahlman@CMU-CS-C.ARPA>]

Good network connections and some time to devote to this are more
important qualifications than "status", whatever that means.  The
chairpersons of these groups are not responsible for imposing solutions
on people, just for keeping the discussion lubricated and coherent.  So
if you want to volunteer and nobody else does, I think that gives you
sufficient status.

I think that what Guy meant by "the status quo" was that there is no
high-level looping construct in the white pages, just DO and friends,
along with the sequence functions.  I think most of us would like to see
a really good standard iteration facility, but DO is suficient until a
sufficiently good proposal comes along.

I think that if most of us can agree that some proposal is "the right
thing", any minor incompatibility with the current manual could be
fixed.  We want the language to be reasonably stable from now on, but
a minor change in the syntax of LOOP is not going to kill anyone.  In
any event, an easy fix is just not to call the new thing LOOP, but to
give it some other name.

I haven't studied the issue extensively, but my hunch is that I would
like something similar to the current Lisp Machine LOOP facility, but
with a more Lispy syntax -- parentheses replacing some of the
pseudo-english.  This PSL facility sounds like that.  Is a description
of it available online so that we could all take a look at it?

-- Scott