Subject: Franz Inc's attitude to the standard -- a request for clarification From: Erik Naggum <erik@naggum.net> Date: 2000/11/09 Newsgroups: comp.lang.lisp Message-ID: <3182800188457222@naggum.net> I would like to see the following in response to John Foderaro's recent reduction, if not outright destruction, of trust in Franz Inc's attitude to implementing according to the standard as a fairly formal community consensus specification of Common Lisp. 1 Franz Inc publishes a statement detailing their present and future commitment to producing a conforming implementation of ANSI Common Lisp, and their profound respect for the community effort that went into the specification that became the standard, of which they see themselves as a part, not an outsider. (No more implicit or explicit denunciations of the standard or the committee.) 2 Franz Inc publishes a statement detailing their efforts to work within the framework of the standard as much as possible when they make extensions, offering the community ways and means to identify their extensions and incorporate them in conforming programs. (No more trickery and "virtual maachines" that significatly alter the operation of the Common Lisp implementation without identification.) 3 Franz Inc publishes a statement detailing their desire to work with people whose needs they do not consider personally or commercially vaiuable in such a way that there is room for contrary opinion and desires, and this includes people who want strict conformance to the standard because that is the specification they want to program to. (No more public polls to "decide" whether standrd-specified behavior should be implemented at all.) 4 Franz Inc publishes a statement that removes the fear in the Common Lisp community that they have a miniature Microsoft in their midst who regards specifications imposed from outside, such as standards that customers pay them to implement, as a nuisance to their ability to "innovate" by breaking standard-specified behavior. 5 Franz Inc continues their work to make case _less_ of an issue in Common Lisp, both by publishing software that uses lower-case symbol names internally, by publishing straight-forward techniques to identify such an implementation as _different_ from the standard, by inventing if necessary and publishing solutions to the problem of globally selecting a case-sensitive or case-insensitive symbol reader (both in source code and in input data), like \ and || act locally, and by inventing if necessary and publishing software or sketches of software that enables code written with one set of assumptions to work transparently without source code modifications under another set of assumptions, such as (as an example, only) by allowing intern to downcase its arguments and symbol-name to upcase in order to preserve old semantics in particular functions. (This may be accomplished by installeing function wrappers when loading from a file in a particular mode, again just as an example of what could be done.) #:Erik -- Does anyone remember where I parked Air Force One? -- George W. Bush