From miller@cs.rochester.edu Tue Oct 19 16:54:19 EDT 1993 Article: 11239 of comp.lang.lisp Xref: crabapple.srv.cs.cmu.edu news.announce.newgroups:3880 news.groups:84760 comp.lang.lisp:11239 comp.lang.lisp.mcl:4312 comp.lang.lisp.x:1054 comp.lang.lisp.franz:258 comp.lang.scheme:7645 comp.lang.clos:2119 comp.lang.dylan:1294 comp.std.misc:865 Path: crabapple.srv.cs.cmu.edu!honeydew.srv.cs.cmu.edu!das-news.harvard.edu!noc.near.net!howland.reston.ans.net!pipex!uunet!bounce-back From: miller@cs.rochester.edu (Brad Miller) Newsgroups: news.announce.newgroups,news.groups,comp.lang.lisp,comp.lang.lisp.mcl,comp.lang.lisp.x,comp.lang.lisp.franz,comp.lang.scheme,comp.lang.clos,comp.lang.dylan,comp.std.misc Subject: RFD: comp.org.lisp-users and comp.std.lisp Followup-To: news.groups Date: 18 Oct 1993 16:03:31 -0400 Organization: University of Rochester Computer Science Dept Lines: 118 Sender: tale@rodan.UU.NET Approved: tale@uunet.uu.net Message-ID: NNTP-Posting-Host: rodan.uu.net This is a formal Request for Discussion for the creation of two newsgroups: ***Proposed Names: Proposed Moderation: Proposed Moderator: comp.org.lisp-users No comp.std.lisp Yes miller@cs.rochester.edu ***Charter: comp.org.lisp-users Discussion of general topics relevant to the Association of Lisp Users (ALU) (including Lisp Vendors), in particular centered on membership issues, future conferences, publications, and Lisp advocacy issues. Overlap with comp.lang.lisp.*, and other groups this message is cross-posted to should be minimal, as this is NOT intended to be a technical, but an organizational group. The ALU mailing list will be bidirectionally gatewayed into this newsgroup. PARTICIPATION WILL NOT BE LIMITED TO CURRENT ALU MEMBERS. Anyone is welcome to post (appropriate messages). comp.std.lisp (also see below) This moderated (sub)group is intended to foster focused discussion on user-group supported standards that are not addressed in the (almost final) ANSI Common Lisp. It will be moderated for appropriateness to the group and timeliness, and not for technical content; the moderator will periodically post the status of all ALU standard proposals, open and close discussions on new standards, and call for specific technical experts to take charge of each standard (for surveying existing practice, proposing, incorporating changes, and wording the final version). The moderator will be reponsible for recording all finalized standards for the ALU, assigning identifiers and submitting copies to all interested vendors. The intent is to give feedback to the several LISP vendors for inter-vendor compatible support of various features that have developed too late to be included in the work of ANSI committee X3J13, such as (but not limited to) DEFSYSTEM, Foreign Function Interface, and Multiprocessing. Note that ALU board member Brad Miller (miller@cs.rochester.edu) volunteered at the LUV '93 conference to moderate such a newsgroup, and act as the ALU "de facto" standards coordinator for the vendor and user community. PARTICIPATION WILL NOT BE LIMITED TO CURRENT ALU MEMBERS. Anyone is welcome to post (appropriate messages). *** Reasoning behind this RFD Although SLUG (Symbolics Lisp Users Group) evolved into the Association of Lisp Users, the mailing list for SLUG is still used for discussions related to issues regarding Symbolics products. As such, it is not the appropriate vehicle for discussions relevant for the entire membership of ALU. One of the primary purposes behind the ALU organization is to promote the use of, and education about LISP-like languages. At the ALU (open) board meeting at LUV '93, we discussed this and felt that a newsgroup in the comp.org hierarchy could best help us achieve our goals of disseminating information about promoting lisp to interested parties, have a single place for discussing how the ALU can help parties interested in lisp, and have a useful place for discussion on future conferences and a possible periodical take place. The newsgroup will also cut down the number of addresses on the direct ALU list, which should ease support chores on that list as well. Futhermore the common-lisp mailing list is designed for technical, rather than evangelical discussions; furthermore the ALU does NOT restrict itself to only common-lisp, but all dialects of lisp like languages. The other major discussion at that point was on how to get the various vendors of lisp products to merge their incompatible definitions of several common features, namely DEFSYSTEM, foreign function interface, and multiprocessing. The vendors suggested that feedback from the user group would be welcome, and it was clear that only through user pressure would the vendors be inclined to improve the existing situation (which for those of us who maintain "portable" software that needs to work under several vendors offerings know is quite painful). At that time, I volunteered to coordinate such "de facto" (better called "de dicto") standards creation for the ALU, though commentary would be open to all interested parties. comp.std.lisp would be the place to hold specific focused discussion on these evolving standards, which would ultimately evolve into some sort of request to the vendor community to support specific features (in addition to, or in place of overlapping features they already support). Note that this is in response to vendor wishes: they want more feedback from the user community; this is one way of providing it, with the ALU representing the users. Some of the standards developed will be considered optional: in general, the standards so developed will not necessitate vendors to implement features they do not wish to support (e.g. version control under defsystem), but rather be a request that if they do support such a feature, that the ALU standard be one of the ways of accessing it. (So, e.g. Franz would be free to not support version control at all, or support their own, presumably better implementation, but in the latter case should also support the ALU standard for version control under defsystem). While the initial discussion on comp.std.lisp will concentrate on common-lisp, it is not, in principle, so limited; it is intended to be a good place for users of any lisp dialect to communicate and attempt to agree on non-formal standards that can be used as feedback from users to vendors and other implementation groups. *** Procedure: Any discussion should be kept in news.groups; and should include ALU somewhere in the title. By 12 November, if interest warrants, a CFV will be initiated by miller@cs.rochester.edu, and will be conducted by an impartial third party. This article is being mailed to the following lists in addition its posting to the newsgroups listed in the Newsgroups: header above. slug@ai.sri.com clim@bbn.com common-lisp@ai.sri.com allegro-cl@ucbvax.berkeley.edu Thanks for your interest and consideration, Brad Miller, for the ALU, miller@cs.rochester.edu