FYI

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

Apparently my mail to the address below is now reaching Yuasa, with
about 1 day delay in most cases.  I've tried to contact Ida, but haven't
heard from him yet.  Let's see what we can learn about Common Lisp
politics in Japan, and then discuss what to do about technical committee
membership, etc.  Yuasa and Hagiya are knowledgeable, energetic, and
speak pretty good English.  Ida is mroe senior and seems to be running
various bureaucratic Common Lisp coordination functions over there.  Ida
translated the silver book to Japanese.  It may be that we'll want to
invite both Yuasa and Ida to join the technical committee, or just one,
or have them set up a committee over there to mirror what we are doing.

-- Scott
---------------------------------------------------------------------------
Date: Wednesday, 26 March 1986  11:01-EST
 From: Scott E. Fahlman <Fahlman>
To:   nttlab!kurims!yuasa at SU-SHASTA.ARPA
cc:   fahlman
Re:   Common Lisp standardization

Dear Mr. Yuasa:

Now that we have established netmail contact, we would very much like to
get the input of you and Mr. Hagiya on the Common Lisp issues we have
been discussing.  The first step, if you haven't done this already, is
to send mail to Dick Gabriel "RPG@SU-AI.ARPA" and ask him to add your
name to the Common Lisp mailing list.  That is where all the discussions
take palce, and by sending mail to "Common-Lisp@SU-AI" you can respond
to anything you see there or raise your own questions and issues.  If
your computer is able to forward messages on this list to others in
Japan, that would be useful, but at least you and Mr. Hagiya should be on
it.  Of course, since most people on the list are in the U.S., all the
discussion is in English.

The technical committee that we announced for X3J13 is rather small
(only eight members so far), and this group will be preparing the new
Common Lisp standards document that we will propose for ANSI and ISO
approval.  We expect to discuss all the issues on the public
Common-Lisp mailing list, so being on the technical committee is not
important for participating in the debate.  The committee members will
vote on what goes into the document if there is not a clear consensus in
the larger community, but I expect this to be very rare.  The main job
of the technical committee is to participate in creating the actual
specification document.

We will need to find out more about the situation in Japan before we can
decide how to proceed in adding Japanese menbers to the technical
committee.  We may add just one person, who would be responsible for
collecting and representing the views of others in Japan.  I'm not sure
whether this should be the person with the most Lisp experience, or if
it is important to choose someone with a high academic rank.  We might
add more than one Japanese member to the committee, though we must be
careful not to let the committee get too large and slow-moving.  Or
maybe there should be a Japanese committee that would correspond to the
U.S.  committee, with close contacts between the two.  But until we
decide what to do, we would very much like to get your participation
through the Common Lisp mailing list.

Aside from yourself, Mr. Hagiya, and Professor Ida, are there other
leaders in the Japanese Common Lisp community with whom we should be in
contact?  Anything you could tell us about what sorts of Common Lisp
activities have been going on in Japan would be valuable.

Best regards,
Scott Fahlman