My absence

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

Reply to Moon:

    I have begun reading Common-Lisp mail again.  There are 314 messages
    at present, with more arriving daily.  If we assume an average of 10
    minutes a message (and that's assuming quite a high proportion of
    messages dismissed out of hand without thinking about them seriously),
    it will take 50 hours to process the lot.  Even though I now will be
    able to spend some time on this, it seems unlikely that I will catch up
    on the backlog before the Lisp conference.

I think that the summaries I sent out for issues 5 - 13 (with summaries
on issue 14 and declaration scoping rules to follow) should be helpful.
If you read those first, maybe you can skip or skim the huge number of
messages that led up to the summary.

The mailing list etiquette messages that RPG and I sent seem to have
helped a little bit.  At least, half of the Clisp messages I received
today are to me alone, and only a couple will result in mailing list
traffic.  Now if we can find some way to tranquilize David C Plummer and
Larry Masinter, we might get mail volume down to a reasonable level.  I
don't suppose that there's a joint Symbolics/Xerox technical center in
Rangoon to which these guys could be assigned?  Each occasionally has
something useful to say, but they are both so determined to get in the
last word on every issue that we have a nasty race condition... I
hesitate to suggest that we start ignoring their mail, but it may come
to that.

I plan to ask people to observe a moratorium on Common Lisp mail for a
period around the Lisp conference.  It won't be 100% effective, of
course, but should keep us from returning to find 500 new messages.

Good luck in catching up.  I'll help however I can.

-- Scott