D Herring  <dherring@at.tentpost.dot.com> wrote:
+---------------
| Kent M Pitman wrote:
| >> The next best thing, CLtL2, seems to have a cleaner heritage.
| > 
| > As a matter of intellectual property ownership, perhaps. But it
| > doesn't match the CL spec in semantics.  So the question becomes: why
| > do you need such a thing in the first place?  What would it accomplish
| > to acquire, even if Steele were to offer it, rights to someone's
| > personal description of a language that isn't even the one you could use.
...
| CLtL2 provided a useful foundation for dpANS...
+---------------

No it didn't! You haven't been listening, and as a result you have
the arrow of causality pointing in the wrong direction! As Kent said,
CLtL2 was a separate effort by Steele [and his publishers] which was
a snapshot *from* the work-in-progress being done by the ANSI X3J13
committee circa October 1989, midway between CLTL1 and the final ANSI
standard, but CLtL2 itself -- a separate, copyrighted book -- did
not feed back *into* the ANSI process at all. Therefore, it cannot
be said to have been any kind of "foundation for dpANS"; if anything,
the reverse is true.

*CLTL1* was certainly the foundation from which X3J13 began, but CLtL2
forked off in the middle and never came back (so to speak). Its Preface
and Acknowledgments should make this very clear:

    http://www.cs.cmu.edu/Groups/AI/html/cltl/clm/node2.html
    Preface
    ...
    The purpose of this second edition is to bridge the gap between
    the first edition and the forthcoming ANSI standard for Common
    Lisp. Because of the requirement for formal public review, it
    will be some time yet before the ANSI standard is final. This
    book in no way resembles the forthcoming standard (which is being
    written independently by Kathy Chapman of Digital Equipment
    Corporation with assistance from the X3J13 Drafting Subcommittee).

    http://www.cs.cmu.edu/Groups/AI/html/cltl/clm/node3.html
    Acknowledgments
    ...
    Digital Press and I gave permission to X3J13 to use any or
    all parts of the first edition in the production of an ANSI
    Common Lisp standard. Conversely, in writing this book I have
    worked with publicly available documents produced by X3J13 in
    the course of its work, and in some cases as a courtesy have
    obtained the consent of the authors of those documents to quote
    them extensively. This common ancestry will result in similarities
    between this book and the emerging ANSI Common Lisp standard
    (that is the purpose, after all). Nevertheless, this second
    edition has no official connection whatsoever with X3J13 or ANSI,
    nor is it endorsed by either of those institutions.


-Rob

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