Matthew Astley wrote: > > I think I lack background on how standards are made and adopted, so > would appreciate input from anyone who remembers or has read about > CL's formation. Is there a "The making of ANSI CL" document? > > This is not a top-post...
According to Kent Pitman, it took many thousands of dollars to pay for ANSI CL. I can't quite find the usenet post he wrote right now. In 1987, Symbolics' revenue was $100 million. That means they could easily afford to participate/fund ANSI specs. I don't want to speculate on how much money the main Lisp players make. Personally, I believe that the best thing is to ignore all that 'standards' stuff, and just use grassroots campaigning to get people using whatever library it is. But one important point is this: New versions of Java have been known to break old Java programs badly, and it's only been around about 12 years. But I can still run 1989 Lisp code (that CMU repository with stuff like profilers and single-step debugging tools) in Clisp, without a single change. Of course, I wish I could say the same about threads and sockets. I'd say that the Common Lisp spec has been *too* well designed. :-) Cheers, Jeremy. -- | Jeremy Smith | Founder and Developer, San Fran Systems _______________________________________________ Gardeners mailing list [email protected] http://www.lispniks.com/mailman/listinfo/gardeners
