Jeremy Smith writes: > 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. :-)
Here is a lisp program written before or in 1960 which runs perfectly well in Common Lisp implementations in 2006: http://groups.google.com/group/comp.lang.lisp/browse_frm/thread/41c7555a7bd5ba4f/ab2f4d3648c8dfa6?lnk=st&q=&rnum=1&hl=en#ab2f4d3648c8dfa6 Actually, IIRC this algorithm has been published in 1960 in the IBM Journal "Toward Mechanical Mathematics", and was developed in 1958 and implemented on the first LISP implemented on IBM 704, so it must be one of the first lisp programs. -- __Pascal Bourguignon__ http://www.informatimago.com/ READ THIS BEFORE OPENING PACKAGE: According to certain suggested versions of the Grand Unified Theory, the primary particles constituting this product may decay to nothingness within the next four hundred million years. _______________________________________________ Gardeners mailing list [email protected] http://www.lispniks.com/mailman/listinfo/gardeners
