slides for meeting

[David A. Moon <Moon@STONY-BROOK.SCRC.Symbolics.COM>]

The slides look okay to me without any changes.

I don't think it's necessary for me to present section 2.2, I think you
can do fine.  I also think we should not go into much detail here.
Flash up the charts and diagrams but don't try to explain them and don't
leave them up long enough for the audience to read carefully all the way
through them.  We're not trying to convince people this section is
technically correct, we're just giving them an overview of how it's
structured.  Right?  You might want to talk briefly about how and why
the structure differs from CLtL.

The same goes for the other sections presented in detail.  I don't think
we want to take the time to try to convince the audience that what was
written down is technically correct.  We just want to present the
structure of the text and how it differs from CLtL.  For a suggestion
for where we should spend time, see below.

I don't think I can present section 4.1.  I once offered to rewrite it,
but I have not done so, and I'm not really all that familiar with the
section.  Last I heard RPG was going to work on it, but I don't know
that he has started to do so.
  
     It seems important to get the committee to agree that the standard is 
     ready to be reviewed. This is the first step to voting it out of
     X3J13.

I agree that it's important.  At first I thought you meant "go out for
public review" and I really would not agree that it's ready for that
myself.  After reading the slides, I see that you meant review within
X3J13 between end of July and mid-October, a whole different story from
public review.  Be sure to be clear about this when presenting!

I think the most important thing to spend time on here, aside from
building concensus that we ought to review the document, which I don't
think will be at all difficult, is the review process.  The drafting
committee has not discussed this at all, at least not recently.  The
review process adopted in March was not followed (as it was determined
to be unrealistic).  As you say, "Reviewers should understand what they
are reviewing for."  I'd like to see us come out of the June meeting
with not only that bald statement, but a specific statement of what
they are reviewing for, and a belief that the members of X3J13 both
endorse and, more importantly, understand that statement.  Actually
identifying the individuals who will review can come later.  Do you
have specific review goals already in mind?  If not, should the
drafting committee assemble a statement of goals?  Just to start
things off, I will suggest (in decreasing order of priority):

  1. Faithfulness to the decisions made by X3J13
  2. Lack of ambiguity
  3. Lack of technical inconsistency
  4. Consistency of presentation, typos, grammar, spelling
  5. Clarity of presentation
  6. Niceness of Common Lisp as a programming language

Point 6 is mentioned really as an opportunity to say that that
is NOT a goal of this review process, a stronger statement than
saying that it is the goal with the lowest priority.

Point 3 is given lower priority than point 2 because inconsistency can
be recognized by the reader, whereas ambiguity may go unrecognized and
simply produce different thoughts in different readers.  Points 1, 2,
and 3 are necessary for the document to be used in the way it was
intended.  Points 4 and 5 simply make the document easier to use, so
they get lower priority.  The relative order of 4 and 5 is debatable.

I believe I got the relative order of points 1, 2, and 3 correct.  Of
course the decisions made by X3J13 are certainly ambiguous and probably
inconsistent, so we can't say that goal 1 takes absolute priority over
goals 2 and 3.  But I think we have to put goal 1 first or we will have
chaos, i.e. no basis for making decisions among conflicting reviewers.

Is the above controversial within the gang of six?

Should all reviewers review with the same goals, or should goals
be parcelled out to different individuals?

The other part of the process is finding a way to get people to
actually read the stuff, and finding a way to make sure that
different people read different parts so all of it gets read by
someone (or several people).  I still don't have any ideas for
how to accomplish that.