On Jul 17, 2012, at 11:03 PM, Alex Shinn wrote: > as noted in the following > comment from Kent Pitman: > > One problem was that Common Lisp was more descriptive than > prescriptive. That is, if two implementation communities > disagreed about how to solve a certain problem, CLTL was > written in a way that sought to build a descriptive bridge > between the two dialects in many cases rather than to force a > choice that would bring the two into actual compatibility. This > may even have been a correct strategy since it was most > important in the early days just to get buy-in from the > community on the general approach. The notion that it mattered > for two implementations to agree was at that point a mostly > abstract concern. There were not a lot of programs moving from > implementation to implementation yet. As the user base later > grew and program porting became a more widespread practice, the > community will to invest in such matters grew. But at the time > when CLTL was published, a sense that the language design must > focus on true portability had not yet evolved. > > [from http://www.nhplace.com/kent/Papers/cl-untold-story.html] > > We are at the same point in the Scheme standardization > process.
Do you think it possible that Kent meant to say "a language should never go thru this phase and because it did, Common Lisp withered away" -- at least I can imagine it as someone who went to RnRS meetings thru this era? ____________________ Racket Users list: http://lists.racket-lang.org/users
