Committee membership

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

My understanding of the steering committee, from a brief discussion with
Mathis, is that it is their job to interface to ISO, to prepare
schedules and such, to deal the international politics as necessary, and
to do any other formalisms that have to be done.  The key is that they
accept as their charter to get Common Lisp approved as defined by the
technical committee (us, plus whoever we add).

The strategy of holding Wienreb's withdrawal in reserve is an
interesting one.  The argument on the other side is that if we come up
with this ourselves it will look like we're trying very hard to balance
this thing and be fair to everyone, rather than doing the bare minimum.
That might actually be better psychology, as it could take the wind out
of the sails of the opposition early rather than late.  But I'm happy to
go with keeping all five of us as an initial proposal.

If we get Ohlander, Balzer isn't an issue.  If we get Bobrow, Masinter
isn't an issue.  Adding both Bawden and Rees looks like an inordinate
amount of skew toward MIT.  I've got no real objection, and respect them
both, but it does look unbalanced to me.

Sounds like we're more or less agreed that neither Fateman nor Foderaro
is really a good choice.  It's awkward not having anyone from the
Franz/Tektronix camp, especially since they feel left out and Fateman is
the type to bitch about that.  But I guess we can't give people votes
just because they are complainers.  If we have Bobrow and Griss aboard,
plus maybe Rees, they can't very well accuse us of excluding the
latecomers.

Wegman was just going around saying that his Lisp/VM was nicer than
Common Lisp in this and that respect, and pointing out all the places
where we blew it.  Pure NIH, compounded by the fact that we didn't make
contact with those guys early enough to bring them aboard.  (It never
occurred to me in those days that IBM might be interested in this
stuff.)

I don't know anything about Dexter Pratt.  Seems to me that if someone
has never sent a message to Common Lisp and has no other claim to fame
(e.g.  invented some other major Lisp), that's grounds for
disqualification.  He'd be easier to deal with than Greenblatt (anyone
would be) but that's not sufficient.

-- Scott