[Gardeners] Draft ANSI spec clarification

[Marco Antoniotti]

On Dec 16, 2005, at 1:16 PM, Peter Seibel wrote:

> On Dec 16, 2005, at 8:35 AM, Marco Antoniotti wrote:
>
>>
>> On Dec 16, 2005, at 11:18 AM, David Newton wrote:
>>>>
>>>>
>>> I guess I don't really think the standard is the issue anyway, at
>>> least
>>> not for me. The primary issues for me aren't language issues but
>>> implementation issues, topped by threading, cross-implementation
>>> library
>>> installation, and environment setup.
>>>
>>> Being a developer and not a system administrator, I feel pretty
>>> strongly
>>> that I shouldn't have to fight a battle every time I want to set up a
>>> Lisp web application development environment, worry about whether or
>>> not
>>> threads are supported, figure out how to install all the libraries I
>>> need every time, or rediscover how to integrate my platform's
>>> windowing
>>> system into the standalone application I'm developing.
>>
>> But that is exactly what standards are for.  And in the CL world you
>> need to take into account several implementors commercial and not.
>
> That's true. But there's a big difference, between little "s"
> standards (probably de facto) and "The Standard", i.e. the ANSI
> Standard. As I'm sure you know. My point is that if we want to
> encourage the emergence of standards for anything it needs to be an
> organic process--get implementations to converge on doing the same
> thing in the same way and *then* say, let's write up what we all have
> already agreed upon and call it the FOO Standard. That the Common
> Lisp standard worked at all is, I believe, a consequence that almost
> all of it was the codification of existing practice.

I wholehearthedly agree.  But, from personal experience, and lack of 
time,  it ain't easy.

Cheers

--
Marco Antoniotti					http://bioinformatics.nyu.edu/~marcoxa
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