[fateman: ANSI stuff]

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

Well, the John Foderaro Memorial Flame has arrived, right on schedule.

    Date: Tuesday, 18 March 1986  12:14-EST
    From: fateman at dali.berkeley.edu (Richard Fateman)
    To:   FAHLMAN
    cc:   fateman at dali.berkeley.edu
    Re:   ANSI stuff

    Scott: pardon my ignorance, but I do not know how the members of
    the technical committee satisfy the requirements placed on them by
    the letter.

    Was there a call for volunteers?
    Perhaps a call for additional nominations would be in order?

    Perhaps a 1-page description of each person, with,
    a list of selected publications, etc, would be appropriate?

Suggestions as to how we should answer this?  Ignoring it would probably
be a bad idea.

I think that on the issue of volunteers, we should say that we didn't
call for volunteers because every company would then have felt compelled
to put forward a candidate and then lobby for him, and since we couldn't
take them all we thought it would be unwise to start this circus, so we
did what we were charged to do: we selected the committee ourselves.  We
should also repeat that the full X3J13 committee will be open to anyone
who wants to join.

To answer the other part of the query, we probably need to put together
very short bios of all the members of the technical committee.  I don't
think that this should concentrate on publications -- this is not a
tenure case -- but on practical contributions to Common Lisp and to
other parts of the Lisp world.  The trick is to express this so that
there is a quantum gap between everyone on the committee ("world-class
people" in RPG's terms) and someone like Foderaro or Fateman.  This gap
has never been apparent to me -- that's why I wanted to include
Foderaro, though I don't want to back down now, since it would bring a
dozen other candidates out of the woodwork.

For those of us in the gang of five (minus one) it's an obvious case to
make: as the key participants in the Common Lisp design so far, we're
the experts: the existing Common Lisp manual should be a sufficient list
of publications.  Bobrow is easy to justify.  Griss, Rees, and Bawden all
have significant accomplishments to their credit, but how do we describe
that to make them sound qualitatively different?

-- Scott