[yuasa: forwarded]

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

Our original discussions of who should be on the technical and steering
committees took place on a smaller mailing list, but as we begin to
consider adding foreign members to these committees, I think that the
full steering and technical committees ought to be involved.

Unlike the situation in Europe, Common Lisp seems to be enthusiastically
accepted in Japan as the future standard for Lisp work.  Of course,
there's also great interest in Prolog, but a lot of the companies are
quietly working on Lisp, leaving Prolog to ICOT.  Anyway, it has been
our intention to add a Japanese member to the technical committee as
soon as possible.

Unfortunately, while the Japanese have occasionally sent netmail to me,
I seem to be unable to answer, and I gather that others in the U.S. have
been no more successful.  The ability to stay in touch with the rest of
us by netmail and to read the Common Lisp mailing list is critical for
any prospective member of the technical committee.  Have any of you had
success in sending mail over there?  The message included below took
three days to reach me, and I have no idea if my attempt to reply will
work.

In our earlier discussions, the leading Japanese candidate for the
technical committee was Dr. Masayuki Ida, an assistant professor at
Aoyama Gakuin University.  He is the one who translated the Common Lisp
manual into Japanese, and seems to be very active in setting up
communication among the Japanese Common Lisp community.  Of course, we
want to consult with as many of the Japanese as possible before choosing
someone.

Mr. Yuasa and Mr. Hagiya of Kyoto University were also discussed.  They
are technically very proficient, having implemented Kyoto Common Lisp
 from scratch, with no direct help from the U.S.  However, the feeling
was that they are perhaps too junior -- I think that they are the
equivalent of Research Associates in the U.S., and neither yet has his
Ph.D.  The Japanese are very status conscious, so selecting a junior
person as the Japanese representative might be awkward.

Anyway, I just received the following message from Yuasa, and replied
with a test message that may or may not get through.  I'll let you know
if I am able to establish contact (which would probably indicate that we
can reach Ida and some others as well).  If my message doesn't make it
after a reasonable time, I'll send Yuasa some snailmail explaining that
we want to cooperate closely with them, but need reliable netmail first.
In any event, Yuasa and Hagiya should be added to the official X3J13
physical mailing list.

-- Scott

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Date: Thu, 20 Mar 86 20:56:40+0900
 From: yuasa at kurims.kurims.kyoto-u.junet
To:   fahlman at cmu-cs-c.ARPA

Dear Prof. Fahlman,

Someone passed me your EMAIL on the Subject "Committee Membership for
ANSI/ISO" addressed to common-lisp@su-ai.arpa.

I am very much interested in joining the X3 Committees.
I strongly believe that we (Masami Hagiya and I) can contribute to the
standardization efforts of the US Common Lisp community.
As you may have already heard, our Common Lisp system KCL is running at more
than 150 sites in Japan on many different machines, including VAX, SUN, 
Apollo Domain, and AT&T 3B2.  In a sense, KCL itself is becoming the standard
in Japan.  Many comments are coming to us about the language specification of
Common Lisp, and we ourselves have already got enough experiences with Common
Lisp.  Indeed, half of the software produced in our institute is written in
Common Lisp now a days.  We will publish an introduction book on Common Lisp
in this spring (in Japanese first, then hopefully translated into English).
Now that a wide-ranged computer network is available throughout Japan, we can
also play the role of the gateway between the US community and Japanese
community.

Could you please send me more information about the X3 Committees?

We are very happy if we can work for the world-wide cooperation of the
Lisp standardization.

Sincerely,

Taiichi Yuasa
Research Institute for Mathematical Sciences,
Kyoto University, Japan

nttlab!kurims!yuasa@Shasta.arpa