Subject: Re: Who needs another Lisp _standard_? (Was: Re: islisp) From: Erik Naggum <clerik@naggum.no> Date: 1998/08/30 Newsgroups: comp.lang.lisp Message-ID: <3113489666751662@naggum.no> * Andi Kleen <ak@muc.de> | Could someone shortly explain the major differences between Common Lisp | and the current ISLisp draft? for what it's worth, ISO/IEC 13816:1997 "Information technology -- Programming languages, their environments and system software interfaces -- Programming language ISLISP", has been passed. it's 126 pages long. the major difference? Common Lisp is an "a posteriori" standard, while ISLisp is an "a priori" standard, i.e., for Common Lisp, experiences from the real world preceded the creation of the standard, while in the ISLisp case, the standard precedes experiences from the real world. ISO has been a breeding ground for a priori standards lately, especially in the "information technology" area. such standards usually fail to become adopted, since nothing exists from which users migrate into complying systems, and no implementation that has had years of experiences to iron out the early design flaws and implementation problems to help implement or migrate an implementation into compliance. I fail to see any positive purposes of ISLisp, although I can see the negative purposes of it becoming a standard very clearly. such is the case of many features in standards and even in many standards. those who like sausages, laws, and standards are well advised not to learn how they are made. #:Erik, who worked with ISO/IEC JTC 1/SC 18 standards for four years. -- http://www.naggum.no/spam.html is about my spam protection scheme and how to guarantee that you reach me. in brief: if you reply to a news article of mine, be sure to include an In-Reply-To or References header with the message-ID of that message in it. otherwise, you need to read that page.