At the just-concluded Interim WG meeting, there was a certain amount of
discussion of the idea of splitting the Introduction document into two roughly
equal-length document (the split being just after 'Examples').
The basic rationale for splitting it was that it's too lengthy (and detailed,
towards the end) a document to give to someone who just wants to know
'something about LISP', but that the first part is not a bad introduction to
LISP to those who want to know 'something about it'.
(Albeit that the focus is 'what are the main moving parts _inside_ LISP, and
how do they interact', rather than 'this is what LISP can do for you', or any
number of other potentially useful documents).
There are good points both ways (two documents, and one), and we had a certain
amount of indecision about what to do.
Since the document is _already_ structured as 'a shorter adocument within a
larger one' (with the explicit notation that people can read just the first
part, if they want a 'brief intro to LISP'), it seemed a natural move to
_actually_ split it in two. Other than a certain amount of editorial work
(inter-section references would have to be fixed), it needed little work to
accomplish.
So we agreed to do it.
Hoever, on thinking about it a bit, I decided that while that would result in
a perfectly find stand-alone first document, the second would be problematic.
To use an analogy I came up with, it was rather like a decapitated body - it
was so obviously the second part of something, and there was no good way to
make a standalone document out of it. (Imagine the title... "Intro: Part II"?)
The only solution seemed to be to put the head back on...
People seemed to understand, and agree, that there was a problem with the
second half as a stand-alone document, so we then decided we'd leave it as
one.
We further decided that we'd emphasize the two-part nature of the document by
formally splitting it into "Part I" and "Part II".
What do people think of this? Is everyone happy with it? If someone would
prefer two, can they see a way to make a viable document out of the second
half? Speak!
Noel
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