Technical Committee

[David A. Moon <Moon@SCRC-STONY-BROOK.ARPA>]

    Date: Sun, 9 Mar 1986  17:23 EST
    From: "Scott E. Fahlman" <Fahlman@C.CS.CMU.EDU>
    But if we cut out Foderaro, we
    will need a very carefully crafted statement of just what our criteria
    are and how we plan to operate so that companies without members on teh
    committee will not have any nasty suprises.

Surely at this point no one thinks we are going to make any hasty decisions!
It's not only Franz inc, and not only other implementing companies that need
to be safe from nasty surprises, it's the user community.  Those of us with
new ideas about how languages should work must keep those interests separate
from the work of the Common Lisp technical committee.

I think we ought to be looking at a timescale of three years for any actual
changes to the language (as opposed to mere clarifications of ambiguous
language in the manual, which could reasonably be on a one-year timescale).
Don't forget that we're talking now about implementations with tens of
thousands of users, put out by professional organizations that are serious
about quality control, documentation, compatibility, support, training, and
all those good things that universities are lucky enough not to have to worry
about.  We can't just change something and shout down the hall to all four
users that it has changed and they need to update their programs.  Even
mere clarifications will take a lot longer than we might think they ought to,
and I don't think there is anything bad about that.