Re: ISO etc

[Stephen L. Squires <SQUIRES@USC-ISI.ARPA>]

I will try to address each of the points you made:

1.  I am sensitive to the Balzer issue.  His role on Common LISP
standardization will be strictly in a supporting capacity since some
people in his division of ISI will be dealing with collecting and
preparing the validation suite.  Balzer is not not interested in
being part of the standization process.  I do expect him to be a
significant user of Common LISP as part of some projects in advanced
programming environments which are AI-based.  The purpose of the CLF
presentation was to give an example of an advanced environment that
could benefit from an explicit object model in LISP.

2.  I would like Ron Ohlander to be part of the small steering committee
that would help to guide the various Common LISP activities including
providing guidance to the validation work.  The actual administrative
support including network mail and archieving and distribution services
will require the support of the computing center within ISI that is 
currently part of Ron's responsibility.

3.  The BBN Bfly issue continues to amaze me.  They appear to be resisting
all attempts to make the Bfly useful that involve developing any system
software outside BBN.  (I have a problem in taking direct action because
of the fact that this part of the project is currently the responsibility
of the infamous Engineering Applications Office.)  A latter from LUCID
that describes the offer that you described addressed to me may help me
to document the situation and resolve it.  I believe there needs to be
a graceful transition path from Common LISP workstations to the coarse
grain multiprocessors so that the developers can focus on the significant
issues.  I have taken the position that this needs to be a high quality
implementation of LISP, should support message passing initially, and
needs to be available as soon as possible.  The BBN approach is clearly
to high risk and too far off in the future to satisfy this need.  What
BBN is currently involved in is parallel LISP research project which
is not coordinated with any technology base activities in IPTO.

4.  Network access needs to be handled carefully because of the increasing
number of people that want to be on the network.  The relation to Stanford
is a much better path than with ISI.

Thanks for your candid comments!