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From: mad@math.keio.ac.jp (MAEDA Atusi)
Subject: Re: ISO/IEC CD 13816 -- ISLisp
In-Reply-To: barmar@bbnplanet.com's message of Thu, 21 Dec 95 13:31:14 EST
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Organization: Faculty of Sci. and Tech., Keio Univ., Yokohama, Japan.
References: <49u965$948@goanna.cs.rmit.EDU.AU>
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Date: Mon, 8 Jan 1996 04:08:10 GMT
Lines: 83

(I failed to post this article and retried several times.  Sorry if
you see this many times).

 > [Erik Naggum]
 > |   I find ISLisp a depressing development.  it appears unnecessary, and it
 > |   is gratuitously different from Common Lisp.  have you failed to realize
 > |   that Lispers are facing people who want nothing stronger than to
 > |   ridicule Lisp because they don't understand it and so don't want to use
 > |   it?  what better weapon to give them than to point out that even
 > |   Lispers don't want to talk each others' languages?

 > [MAEDA Atusi] (supercite undone)

 > |   Do you mean you want single standard, instead of several parallel
 > |   standards (as we have now)?

 > and precisely which several parallel standards do you mean?  IEEE Scheme
 > and ANSI Common Lisp, right?  as far as I'm concerned, that's one, single
 > standard for each of those languages.  I this sense, I already have what I
 > want.

 > |   Then that's what ISLisp is intended to be.

 > do you mean that ISLisp will cause IEEE Scheme and ANSI Common Lisp to go
 > away?  that's an amazing attitude, to put it mildly.  ISLisp will clutter
 > up the Lisp world even _more_ than the current set of standard and
 > non-standard Lisps do.

Please don't extract sentence out of its context.  My sentence above
should be read "(if you want single standard) then that's what ISLisp
is intended to be."

[Unicode stuff deleted]
 > |   Or are you asking for accepting Common Lisp (or one of other existing
 > |   standards) as international standard?

 > again, _which_ "other existing standards"?  of course I'm asking that
 > instead of going ahead to create yet another Lisp standard, we use the one
 > that successfully became a standard.

Why do you belive two is the best number for standards?  I agree with
you that Common Lisp and Scheme each has its own importance.  And
ISLisp emphasizes another aspect.  It tries to be a language which is
small and easy to implement efficiently.

 > |   If the standard, as a result of deep arguments on individual features,
 > |   eventually becomes exactly the same as Common Lisp, then that's fine.
 > |   I'm willing to accept it.  But I don't think modification is
 > |   automatically a bad thing.

 > "modification" is neutral.  it's the _reason_ for making modifications that
 > may be good or bad.  a change may be an improvement with a strong consensus
 > behind it, one that users have essentially already adopted and are just for
 > the standard to reflect.  a change may also be a gratuitous destruction of
 > the past and of the consensus among users.  ISLisp represents the latter in
 > the areas where it does not do useful invention (like the way it treats
 > dynamic binding), but invention in committees is not building a consensus.

Yes, a change can be good or bad.  And "the past" alone doesn't make
it good or bad.  And consensus can be made after proposal, through
argument.  By what way can changes be made, other than proposing
changes first?

BTW, I can recall there were many arguments against Common Lisp.  Some
people said: "Lisp doesn't need standard at all", "Common Lisp is
largely incompatible with existing implementations (e.g. in lexical
variable bindings)", "Some features of Common Lisp (e.g. multiple
values, dynamically adjustable arrays, etc.) has significant
overhead", etc.

And now Common Lisp seems to be successful and it is widely accepted.

Some inventions in committee may be discarded if they turn out to be
bad and some may survive.  If *all* changes proposed by the committee
are discarded, then we have a consensus rejecting the whole standard.
So why not talking about technical and/or practical aspects of the
language, instead of talking about politics?

;;;  Keio University
;;;    Faculty of Science and Technology
;;;      Department of Math
;;;		MAEDA Atusi (MAEDA is my family name)
;;;		mad@math.keio.ac.jp
