Subcommittee name, scope, JEIDA response

["Thomas Linden (Thom)" <baggins@ibm.com>]

Greetings,
  With my vacation and assignment change (Menlo to San Jose-Almaden)
and home moving in the past, I would like to renew our
conversatinos regarding our subcommittee.

  I have seen notes on the net from Dave Matthews, Larry Masinter and
Bob Kerns. Hopefully the rest of the committee is on the mailing
list with a correct address  (Carl, Duncan and Mike
please confirm you received a copy of this msg from
cl-natural-languages).

  In this note, I would like to discuss the committee name, scope
and JEIDA response.  I felt that Larry's suggestion of a broader
charter was a good one.  Clearly, we will be mucking about in
data types, characters, strings and Input/Output with the character
data type being of central interest.  Thus, we could name ourselves the
CL Character Subcommittee.  Our scope would be to examine proposed
modifications to CLtL relating to the Character data type.  This
includes the appropriate subtypes, type specifiers, predicates and
character and string functions as well as the roles of characters
in reading and printing Lisp objects.

  One of our most pressing items will certainly be the proposal to
extend the CL character support to large character sets.  (By the
way, I propose we call this ECS for extended character support and
avoid confusion over National/Natural/Native.

  I believe ECS is quite important due to the JEIDA and now ISO
activities where the interest in this subject is high.  First, we need
to send an acknowledgement to the Ida and the Kanji working group
for initiating this subject (and our committee).  I have scratched
out the following; please comment freely and quickly.  I would
like to transmit our message within the next two weeks.


-----Start Scratchings-----------------------------------------

To: JEIDA Kanji Working Group
    Masayuki Ida
    Takayasu Ito, chair, JEIDA Committee for Lisp Standardization
    Taiichi Yuasa, chair, JEIDA Technical Working Group for Lisp
                             Standardization

From: ANSI X3J13 Character Subcommittee

  The committee would like to acknowledge and applaud the efforts
of the JEIDA Kanji WG.  The proposal, presented by Shiota-san at the
X3J13 June meeting in Boston, was so well received it
instigated the creation of our Subcommittee!

  The subcommittee members are:
         Thom Linden,chair (IBM Research)
         Larry Masinter (XEROX Research)
         Carl Hoffman (International Lisp Associates)
         Bob Kerns (Symbolics)
         Duncan Missimer (Hewlett-Packard)
         Dave Matthews (Hewlett-Packard)
         Mike Beckerle (Gold Hill)

  Though, our committee will deal with various topics relating to
Common Lisp character support, the primary current topic will be
extensions to support the varied and multiple native character
sets.  In particular, Common Lisp should be able to support
Kanji, Hanja, Hanzi, Chinese, German, French, etc. monolingual and
multilingual applications.

  We look forward to working with the newly formed JEIDA and ISO
committees on a language design which is supportive of the
international community requirements and which provides
for a consistency across varied implementations and machine
architectures in the spirit of CLtL.



-----End Scratchings-------------------------------------------