Re: new CMU CL

["Timothy B. Moore" <moore%cdr@cs.utah.edu>]

   Date: Thu, 21 Mar 91 00:54:08 EST
   From: Rob.MacLachlan@LISP-PMAX2.SLISP.CS.CMU.EDU

       Date: Mon, 18 Mar 91 10:15:46 -0700
       From: "Timothy B. Moore" <moore%cdr@cs.utah.edu>
       To: Rob.MacLachlan@LISP-PMAX2.SLISP.CS.CMU.EDU
       Subject: Re: new CMU CL 

       Incidently, if you would like to check out some of the stuff we are
       doing here, I'm sure an account could be arranged for you.

   Yes, I'd like that.  b.t.w, I put in your account application.  If you
   don't get mail within a week or so, let me know.

I got the account password; I've logged in and checked that it works.
Thanks. My boss (Kessler) is out of town this week, but I'll ask him
about getting an account for you when he returns.

   One of the things that piqued my interest about what was going on in Lisp
   at Utah was Kessler's paper "A Logical Approach to Program Analysis" in the
   Journal of Lisp and Functional Programming.  It seemed like he was working
   on some of the same problems in program construction, but more from the
   top-down (as opposed to my generally bottom-up approach.)  For example,
   function types and compile-time type checking in Python do many of the same
   things has his "templates."

I'm not sure what you are refering to. I've never heard of "the
Journal of Lisp and Functional Programming". Do you mean the
Lisp conference? Bob Kessler co-authored a paper with Kwan-Liu Ma on a
type inference system for Common Lisp. That was Kwan's masters thesis.
I don't think it went anywhere.

   And of course, Sandra Loosemore is very active in Common Lisp
   standardization.  We worked together on the compiler standardization
   issues.  Do you know what they're up to up to at Chestnut.com?

I saw her at the x3j13 meeting last week at Sun. Chestnut appears to
be falling short of their goals of translating Lisp to "readable" C
code; they may have to do more of what kcl does (i.e., punt on
readability). Also, they have some real problems following all Common Lisp
semantics. I don't think Sandra is very happy there.

It's interesting that the committee decided to completely drop the
environment accessors from the language. I wonder what will replace
them. 

Tim