Re: Standardization

[fateman@dali.berkeley.edu (Richard Fateman)]

two parts:
You say you are pleased with CLtL.  Justifiably so.  To say that it should
become the standard, or that the standard should be compatible with it,
is a very strong restriction on the activities of the standards committee.
I don't know if you really mean that.
Do you?

I think this is a possibility, but I think a more enlightened view
might be that the standards committee
should have a much broader view, including the definition of a core
language (remember the different color pages??), perhaps the definition
of a programming environment, and perhaps the error handling etc etc
stuff.
I would endorse something like this.  Would you?

A less enlightened but perhaps pragmatic view is that the standards
committee will only waste time and keep foreign committees from
replacing the ad hoc definition-by-implementation by some (poor?)
standard.
I think this is what will happen, given the large amounts of attention
given to silly issues like #; and #!.
I believe you have some standards experience.  Paul Hilfinger and I
have Ada and IEEE floating point experience.  What do you thing?


----
second part: 
  you can compose pictures with leftmost component #.

Regards.

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