Scheme Standardization

[Dick Gabriel <RPG@SAIL.Stanford.EDU>]

Because I made my suggestion with the intent of providing another
alternative for the Scheme community, I want to argue neither for nor
against it. I wish to clarify 2 factual errors Will made in his message:

1. Individuals belong to X3J13.  Companies can belong and send some number
of representatives.  All members vote as they wish, but many individuals
vote their company line for whatever reasons, possibly because they have
been told to do so.  I vote as I wish, but I won't guarantee that my sense
of greed will not figure into my vote.  I don't believe IEEE does things
any differently.

2. I never mentioned any such activity as ``Common Lisp 2000'' or the
``next Common Lisp'' to Will (we talked on the phone for an hour or so). I
mentioned that my own goal was to see the Common Lisp community and the
Scheme community working on the next rendition of Lisp. I explicitly
mentioned that there were few positive lessons from Common Lisp for such a
new language - the key contributions were negative (don't do this, don't
do that). I mentioned as the primary set of positive lessons the
experience that Common Lisp implementors had with programming
environments.

I suppose it might be natural for one who believes that association with
Common Lisp is the ``worst possible thing for Scheme'' to not wish to
associate with people involved with Common Lisp, but I see many of the
Common Lisp folks shaking their heads and wondering how such a weird and
depressing experience as Common Lisp standardization could have been
foisted on them. But, alas, such a dreamer am I to wish for co-operation.

			-rpg-