Subject: Re: EVAL Implementations From: Erik Naggum <erik@naggum.no> Date: 1996/08/28 Newsgroups: comp.lang.lisp Message-ID: <3050210651732525@arcana.naggum.no> Robert Munyer, if I ever doubted that you were unreasonable, your last note has certainly removed any shred of it. it is abundantly clear that your purpose now is revenge, rather than any purported "technical" issues. if you should return to technical discussions, please, try to respect that those with whom you try to discuss anything technical might want to refer you to authoritative documents and standards instead of including them in their replies or paraphrasing them with an added chance of introducing more confusion. you strongly suggest that you have higher regard and respect for USENET contributions than for standards documents, and this is an attitude so mind-bogglingly irrational that if I come across as saying "you are stupid, Robert Munyer", it is because that is exactly what I think. BTW, anonymous references to private communication, ostensibly to avoid being the one to slander somebody else, is the best evidence yet to be found on USENET of how low a person can get. such behavior reveals an amazingly cavalier attitude to reproducibility of observations and credibility of conclusions, and points to a fundamental misunderstanding of how legitimate observations and conclusions are made. it is no wonder at all that such a person is incapable of reading a standards document to learn of the facts of a specification, when he obviously believes that it furthers his cause to make such pathetic attacks solely on his opponent. and to have the gall to make the unfounded claim that he wants to discuss technical issues at the same time is... you are in fact wrong on your technical points, Robert Munyer. there is nothing more than "read the fine manual" to tell you. since you refuse to do that, and instead continue to pose irrelevant questions about what people think or believe, based on your own misunderstood assumptions, what exactly did you expect to receive? what would you do with the answers you got? would you use them in anonymous references in discussions with your colleagues that you are somehow correct in your assumptions? would you at any one point go and consult the specification to learn how things _should_ have been done, instead doing a Gallup poll on what a representative sample of the population might think? standards are written by the best people we can find. anybody at all can have opinions. this is why we have standards written by experts instead of Gallup polls on USENET every time we wish to know what Common Lisp, the language, specifies. and it is true, I find unbridled display of arrogant ignorance to be the worst aspect of USENET. and it is true, I do treat people who refuse to listen to authoritative sources and instead go on to ask _people_ what they think, as fundamentally misguided and extremely unlikely to produce anything of reasonable value in a discussion, because they discuss not what is, but what people believe. finally, Robert Munyer, you do most emphatically not _have_ to waste your time in flame wars. if you _want_ to waste your time in flame wars, that is your very own choice. sometimes, it is more effective to shut up than to continue to make the crux of your argument that somebody else is a "pig". you said you had a technical argument. I'll believe it when I see it. I don't think it is possible to have technical discussion with people whose mission it is to convince the world of their own personal misconceptions, including, but not limited to meaningless and pathetic slandering of others. I think a technical discussion must refer to something that is impersonal, such as a standard specification for a programming language. #\Erik -- my other car is a cdr