towards an agenda - yeller pages

[Jonathan A Rees <JAR@AI.AI.MIT.EDU>]

[Seems that CSNET had amnesia this weekend, so I'm re-sending this message. 
   - Jonathan]

Date: Sat, 11 Apr 87 11:15:02 EDT
From: Jonathan A Rees <JAR@AI.AI.MIT.EDU>
Subject:  towards an agenda - yeller pages
To: bartley%home%ti-csl.csnet@RELAY.CS.NET
cc: rrrs-authors@MC.LCS.MIT.EDU
In-reply-to: Msg of Wed 8 Apr 87 15:39:02 cdt from David Bartley <bartley%home%ti-csl.csnet at RELAY.CS.NET>
Message-ID: <183040.870411.JAR@AI.AI.MIT.EDU>

I nominate the general topic of "yellow pages" for the agenda, with the
following subtopics:

  - what the yellow pages are for
  - string manipulation
  - bitwise logical operators
  - byte vectors (or something a little more general)
  - hash tables
  - I/O extensions (e.g. READ-LINE, READ-STRING, maybe a simple FORMAT)
  - sets ?
  - arrays ?

Some thoughts:

By yellow pages I mean a collection of facilities that are implementable
(although not necessarily implemented) in terms of things that are
already in the language.  A description of a yellow pages facility should
be accompanied by a sample implementation for two reasons: (1) as a
substitute for a formal specification (which are hard to write); (2) as
an existence proof that the facility is implementable.  The informal
description should specify what behavior of the sample implementation is
accidental and what's not (e.g. (PAIR? a-hash-table) might be true in a
sample implementation, but not part of the spec).

If we can figure out modules (packages, whatever) then we might even be
able to get away with keeping these things out of the global
namespace.

If we have an official notion of yellow-page, then we should be able to
demote some of the things that are currently in the main part of the
report (MEMQ, EQUAL?, VECTOR-FILL!).  In addition, if we can agree on
macros, most of the derived expression types (with the possible
exception of BEGIN and LETREC) can be similary demoted.

I don't think I like the term "yellow page", but that's another story.

- Jonathan