Technical committee

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

I was unable to reach Griss by phone last week.  We've got to get a
committee in place and start making a systematic attempt to "officially"
resolve the various technical issues that have been raised.  I think
that we should give up on Griss (he can join later if he requests this)
and announce the following technical committee:

Steele, Gabriel, Moon, Fahlman, Bobrow, Rees, Bawden, Foderaro

If someone has a specific objection or counter-proposal, say so, but we
really have to resolve this now and not dither about it any longer.

We should try to make contact with Ida, and we should invite Chailloux
to join if he is interested in being on a committee whose majority
intends to be conservative in dealing with deviations from the Steele
book.  But we should not wait for these developments.

Once the committee is named, we need to do the following:

1. Develop a statement of principles for what we think a standard should
include and under what circumstances we will condsider incompatible
changes from the silver manual.

2. Develop a schedule for completing the standard, and a set of
procedures for moderating our discussions, keeping track of any firm
decisions, and distributing these decisions.  A part of this is to
determine whether we go with the existing book plus a list of changes, a
new edition of the book, or a completely new document that is designed
to be a standard and not a user's manual.  (I lean toward the third
approach because it gives us a chance to do a compacting GC of the
manual, we can keep an absolutely current version online at all times,
and it gets rid of all the awkward entanglements with Digital Press.)

3. Resolve and record the answers to all those issues that we believe
are settled.

After that, we can begin work on the harder issues, perhaps with people
specializing in particular areas: object stuff,
compiler/eval-when/modularity issues, cleaning up the type system,
floating point stuff, etc.

-- Scott