Meeting Next Week

[Sonya E. Keene <skeene@STONY-BROOK.SCRC.Symbolics.COM>]

Yesterday I sent a message about this, but I don't think it got through.
We had an impressive power glitch.    The mail log claimed that my
message was sent successfully, but I never got my copy back from sail.  
So, this might be a repeat of a previous message, but it might not.
Oh well.

For any of you who are wondering if we Symbolians are taking the
Meta-object proposal seriously, the answer is yes.   We were very
pleased to see the draft, which is much more comprehensive than the
previous draft.    Dave has not responded on the mail because he is on
vacation.    I am not ready to respond with comments yet, because I need
some time to read the draft thoroughly and think about it.   Keep in 
mind that this is a lot of new stuff.  

Certainly we should have the meeting.   First of all, we need to 
finalize and agree on the Chapters 1 and 2, so we can distribute them to
X3J13 as soon as possible.    Also, I had hoped we could talk about
constructors in person.   And now that we have a Meta-object Proposal,
we have a good basis for discussion on that as well.   

I also want to give my opinion on productive meetings.   Our meeting in
Palo Alto was productive because we were nearly in agreement on a number
of small issues.   Each person took charge of some issues, and we
discussed them and made decisions on them.    I think the discussion on
the Meta-object Protocol will be productive in a different way, more
like our July meeting in Cambridge.    At that meeting we concentrated
on initialization (one large topic) and talked about it until we
identified the major framework of it, the procedural definition.   That
meeting was not as highly structured as the other meeting, but we got
good results.

I have confidence that our meeting next week can be productive in the
same way.   Along with finalizing Chapters 1 and 2, we have two primary
tasks:   1. reaching agreement on the technical issues of the
Meta-object protocol, and then 2. turning the current proposal into the
usual dry, factual tone of the rest of the specification.   (Yes, we'll
probably have to take out most of those funny lines.)   I'm sure that   
Dave is eager to make some real progress on the Meta-object protocol, as  
am I.   I'm also willing to help out with the writing.