Common Lisp

[Daniel L. Weinreb <dlw at MIT-AI>]

I would appreciate if people would be more careful about what they use
the INFO-LISPM mailing list for.  Fateman's and Gumby's recent pieces of
mail were in the nature of an interactive conversation, rather than
announcements to the LispM user community.  If anyone wants to reply to
them, please do not send your reply to INFO-LISPM; I'd like this mailing
list to only be used for community announcements, so that people won't
be forced to remove themselves from the list in order to free their
mailboxes from clutter.  Thank you for your cooperation.

Regarding the current draft Common Lisp specification: you are all
welcome to read it, but consider this: it is the very first draft, and
has not yet been modified to take into account the considerations of the
LispM community, *currently* represented mainly by Dave Moon and myself.
I would frankly prefer that you guys *don't* all go reading this draft,
because if you do, you will probably find yourself saying "boy, this
feature is really a loss....and I don't like that either..." and you
will all get an unfairly bad impression of what Common Lisp is going to
be about.  You don't like it when people read rough drafts of your
papers before you are ready for comments, do you?  Well, that's what's
going on here.  Guy Steele is doing a terrific job getting this stuff
together, and after we get the first round of comments back to Guy,
and we have a meeting about them, and he gets them edited in, then there
will be a drastically different language specification that will be much
closer to what Common Lisp will really be.

At that time, we hope that anyone who is interested will read it
carefully with a critical eye.  Please don't waste your energy on the
existing draft; if you do, you'll probably be too bored to bother with
the next draft, which is what will really be deserving of your efforts.

If you have any questions, please direct them to me, Moon, and/or Steele
as appropriate (and *not* to INFO-LISPM).  Thanks.