Griss

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

OK, for some reason the mail to me never arrived.  You gave the right
response, except that I'm a bit uneasy about encouraging him to delegate
the task of pre-filtering the mail.  But, as you say, he he takes
responsibility for making the decisions, it's not really any of our
business how he goes about this.

On another matter...

Have you said anything to Chailloux about being on this committee?  In
his last note he asked about how stable Common Lisp is and whether the
gang of five was really interested in input from outside.  I've been
meaning to send him something expressing my personal point of view on
this.

Basically, I think that we are interested in input from anyone who wants
to offer it, and we'd like to share the decision-making by including
some non-U.S. members on the technical committee.  But also that Common
Lisp has now reached the point that any incompatible changes will have
to be considered not only on their inherent merits, but also with
respect to the effort required to change existing implementations,
documentation, user-level code, and retraining users.  I think that the
price of admission to the Common Lisp design comunity is that people
have to take these issues at least as seriously as their own ideas about
truth and beauty in language design.

Of course, we have no objection to people doing other Lisp dialects that
are not so constrained.  It seems unlikely to me that a lot of the big
manufacturers will embrace such new dialects in the near future, but
they could be useful for education -- the role that Scheme seems to be
filling in the U.S.  The only thing that would cause trouble for us
would be an attempt to turn some non-Common Lisp into the ONLY Lisp
sanctioned by ISO or to persuade people that this is the real Common
Lisp.

What I might informally suggest to Chailloux is that if he can embrace
the rather conservative goals of Common Lisp, we'd like to have him on
the technical committee, whether or not he's also working on a distinct
Lisp.  He could play a valuable role in preventing needless difficulties
between the two groups.

-- Scott