[Fahlman: Common Lisp Meeting]

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

Date: Friday, 13 June 1986  01:32-EDT
 From: Scott E. Fahlman <Fahlman>
To:   ida%utokyo-relay.csnet at CSNET-RELAY.ARPA
cc:   fahlman
Re:   Common Lisp Meeting

Professor Ida,

I am pleased to hear that you will be at the Lisp Conference.  Those of us on
the technical and steering committees in the U.S. very much want to meet
with you to discuss what sort of formal liaison should exist between the
Japanese Common Lisp community and our group.  We welcome Japanese
participation in the design discussions and hope that there will be more
of it, but we also want to include one or more Japanese members on our
technical and steering committees, or set up parallel committees in the
U.S. and Japan that would work closely together, or something like that.

We have talked to a few of our colleagues in Japan about how to proceed
with this.  Some have suggested that we should invite your JEIDA
committee to nominate someone to join our committee.  Others have felt
that we must carefully observe the proper formal procedures in dealing
with the Japanese and have said that it is important to involve some
very senior people in this process, even if they do not have much time
or energy to spend on Common Lisp.  We want to make it clear that we
view Japan as a very important partner in the standardization effort,
but we don't know what the proper formal steps are or what groups should
be consulted.  I would very much appreciate hearing your views on how we
should handle this.  Is this new JIS committee on Lisp the right group
for us to deal with?

On the issue of a general Common Lisp meeting at the Lisp Conference, I
don't think there will be one.  We got started rather late in thinking
about this, and now it is rather late to set up such a meeting.  There
is no time left during the conference, so a meeting would have to be the
day before the conference or the day after.  Many people already have
travel plans and would be unable to stay for an extra day.  So I am
afraid that there will not be an opportunity for you to present your
three topics to a general Common Lisp meeting.

Dick Gabriel is about to announce that there will be an open meeting on
Wednesday afternoon (August 6), after the Lisp Conference is over, to
discuss Object-Oriented programming in Common Lisp.  The technical and
steering committees will be meeting at some time during the conference,
perhaps on Tuesday night, and I am sure that you would be welcome to
join us in this meeting and to tell us about the situation in Japan.
The Eulisp group plans to meet at some time during the Boston conference
as well, and many of us will attend that meeting if they allow us to; we
hope that we can make peace with those people without agreeing to let
them put radical changes into Common Lisp.  The first formal meeting of
the ANSI committee, X3J13, will be in Washington on September 23 and 24.
The rules of ANSI make it impossible for this to occur at the time of
the Lisp Conference.  We will be handing out a printed announcement with
the Lisp Conference registration materials that will describe what has
been done on standardization in the U.S. and that invites everyone to
participate in X3J13 if they want to.

In my view, complex issues like subsetting and extended character sets
are best handled by netmail.  I plan to start detailed technical
discussions on a number of issues very soon, and I hope that we work out
a detailed agreement on how to handle this the Boston meeting.  Some
discussion has occurred already, as you have seen, though nothing has
been settled.  Since this extension exists mostly to accommodate Kanji,
we certainly won't adopt anything that the Japanese Lisp community
doesn't like.

Best regards,
Scott Fahlman