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Hold it right there!



I don't like to be picky, but this paragraph is full of lies:

``LISP is the second oldest programming language still in current use.
During its life numerous extensions and incompatable versions have been
tried. In 1982, an effort was begun under the auspices of the Spice
Project at Carnegie-Mellon University and sponsored by DARPA to define a
new commonly acceptable version of LISP. The resulting book Common LISP:
The Language by Guy Steele ...''

During 1982, Steele's efforts on the Common Lisp design document were
funded by LLNL. At the moment, LLNL is in the mood to not be upset at the
outcome, but a statement like this might convince them otherwise.

Also, I would say that many parts of the Common Lisp community would feel
slighted and cheated by finding out that Common Lisp was designed by the
Spice Project at CMU under DARPA funding, when one could just as easily say
that it was started at Stanford in the Formal Reasoning Group and sponsored
by DARPA, or that it was started at LLNL in the S-1 Group and sponsored
by the Navy.

One can quibble that the wording of the statement, under a second and
closer inspection, does not say what I claim it does, but it certainly
strikes people that way on first reading. I believe that a much more
politic statement could be made, and said statement can also give enough
credit to DARPA to justify it happy attitude about Common Lisp.

In the spirit of the Common Lisp effort, I propose a re-wording:

LISP is the second oldest programming language still in current use.
During its life numerous extensions and incompatable versions have been
tried. In 1981 an effort was begun by a number of researchers at several
organizations to define a commonly acceptable version of LISP. The
language specification was written by members of this informal group, but
the coordination of the effort and the bulk of the writing was done under the
auspices of the Spice Project at Carnegie-Mellon University and sponsored
by DARPA.  The resulting book Common LISP: The Language by Guy Steele ...

			-rpg-