I take these as a sign that such schemes could be applied to CL, given
time, interest and people devoted to the work (don't look at me! :) )

Cheers

I was amused by the hypocrisy in your letter when you ended it
with:

    no my opinion is that I do not like associating with liars and cheats
    so will you please go away. If anybody is curious here is the archive
    from google( sorry about the line break):  

Telling someone to leave (I.e never post again) is a priori censorship.
You hate censorship yet you practice it in a big way.

And the link you gave was totally irrelevant, it was some discussion
between Craig Brozefsky, Erik Naggum and Erann Gatt.

http://groups.google.com/groups?q=g:thl1251669294d&hl=en&selm=87itf1a...
40piracy.red-bean.com

 But it was your recent libel that caused me to post:

 Go to groups.google.com and find the postings.  Post the text
snippets here along with links to the whole articles.

 And who is Marc Spitzer anyway?  There seems to be no record of you
on the net before the year 2000.  In the past Erik Naggum has
deceived the members of this newsgroup by posting under aliases
(one we know for sure about was something like "GI Gunmaker").
You come out of nowhere and make all these moralistic claims
while posting lies and hypocrisy to stir up trouble.  This is the
same writing style used by Erik Naggum.  I believe that you are either
another Naggum pseudonym or are posting messages on behalf of him.

In a free speech forum, where people can only say things but not enforce
things, this does not implement censorship.

Censorship is the implementation of making someone leave, not the use of
langauge to hint, cajole, persuade, encourage, trick, or otherwise make
more likely the voluntary choice by another to stand down.

I'm not saying you shouldn't be annoyed when someone tells someone to shut
up.  Just please don't pick words that are terminologically incorrect.
It dilutes the very important meaning of that word and makes it less likely
that anyone will realize it's time to care if outright censorship DOES occur.

If saying someone should go away did amount to censorship, many people
would be guilty of having done this to controversial contributors like
John (on one side of this and other debates) and Erik (often on the other)
long ago.  But the fact is that both continue to post, and that isn't by
magic.  Such continued posting stands as a counterexample to the claim
that censorship is achieved in this way.

(Even boycotting, a stronger phenomenon than is active in this
discussion is not censorship.  It is merely a test of wills involving
an in-bound and reasonable show of will on both sides of an issue in a
free society.)

Telling someone to "go away" may be childish, bullyish, rude.  It may also
be good advice, helpful, and constructive in a certain way.  And sometimes
it can be both at the same time.  But it's not censorship.  

marc

###start quote
Message-ID: <slrn9u72ik.q89.marc@oscar.eng.cv.net>

###end quote

We start our chat at around article
Message-ID: <slrn9pa3p5.etr.m...@oscar.eng.cv.net>
(this is around 40 posts into the thread)

so my orignal post was accurate.  I took you at your word, my mistake
sorry.

First, here's the link to the article we're talking about:
http://groups.google.com/groups?hl=en&threadm=MPG.164d0f8c7fc75944989...
40news.dnai.com&rnum=1&prev=/groups%3Fas_umsgid%3DMPG.164d0f8c7fc7594498971 b%
40news.dnai.com%26hl%3Den

Let's see if I asked a question of you for which the response is
"go away":

Here's the snipped from that above mentioned post

   [I said}  
   >  *Your* opinion is that I should not state my opinion about
   > posts I find juvenile.  Fine. I accept that is your opinion.
   > Just don't bring up censorship.  That makes no sense.
   >

   [you replied]
   no my opinion is that I do not like associating with liars and cheats
   so will you please go away. If anybody is curious here is the archive
   from google( sorry about the line break):  

nope, there's no excuse for trying to convince me to leave so that
I'll never post again.  You are still a hypocrite.

Also you bring up the term liar and cheat in this snippet.

I'll remind you that in a previous post I challenged you to
come up with a post to substantiate that libel.

In another post yesterday you offered this vague hint as to
what you're talking about:

    We start our chat at around article
    Message-ID: <slrn9pa3p5.etr.m...@oscar.eng.cv.net>
    (this is around 40 posts into the thread)

    so my original post was accurate.  I took you at your word, my mistake
    sorry.

Why didn't you say specifically what you were referring to.
Are you referring to the fact that I used the phrase "I donated AllegroServe"
when in fact the company I worked for donated it?

You were then chastised about even complaining about that, such
as in:

http://groups.google.com/groups?q=g:thl2054931052d&hl=en&selm=9n3cnc%...
40216.39.145.192

Now I can't tell if you're an idiot or a liar.  Then again maybe you're just
not a native speaker of English and don't understand the nuances of
the language and thus don't know how to interpret the
phrase "I donated AllegroServe".

###start
Message-ID: <slrn9v4500.b6.marc@oscar.eng.cv.net>

###end

marc

 Everyone who posted except *two* people understood completely
what was meant by donate and didn't consider it to be
an attempt by me to claim that I funded the work.

 Those two people are Marc Spitzer (see the current thread)
and Erik Naggum:

http://groups.google.com/groups?q=donated+group:comp.lang.lisp&hl=en&...
&selm=3208634224537825%40naggum.net

 Is that a coincidence or what?

So will the two of you please just stop or take it to email?  Jesus!  If I want
paranoia and bad grammar I can go to alt.flame!  I use the fruits of Foderaro's
labors (ACL and AServe) every day and I really don't care what different
semantics people attach to "donate."

marc

It is imaginable for many (but not all) optimizations to invent ways to
dynamically revert them, but this involves complex operations with some
non-trivial compiler complexity and runtime space-time costs;
definitely not for the faint of heart, and something that would probably
require an advanced declarative architecture in the compiler so as to
handle the co-production of what is essentially decompilation metadata
(which can be seen as a debugging information formal and complete enough
to allow for automatic exploitation by a runtime decompiler-recompiler)
together with the code for the static-until-modified case.
If anyone knows of a compiler that makes such things easy,
I'm most interested to learn about it.

ThinLisp might be that thing for a CLish languages; I haven't tried
very hard to use it and compare, but it doesn't seem to me it has as
advanced memory allocation techniques as the ML-Kit -
maybe some path to explore for the implementors?

PS: the ML-Kit and relevant papers can be found on
        http://www.it-c.dk/research/mlkit/

  You post lies all the time, but you give us a clue to understand how your
  mind has deteriorated: You believe what is untrue and have become so
  deeply entrenched in your own view of things that you are disconnected
  from reality, and so you draw one insane conclusion after another from
  your own beliefs, not from anything you observe, any longer.  It is hard
  to see when you are _not_ lying, when you do not have ulterior motives,
  when anything you say actually _is_ true, and not something that you only
  say because you hope it will cause people to feel something you want them
  to feel.  This dishonesty and manipulativeness is pandemic.  _Respecting_
  the opinions of anyone else is completely foreign to you: you call people
  "religious" as soon as you are unable to argue against them; you pretend
  that the amazingly idiotic nonsense you keep saying about me or any other
  person who simply want you to respect the standard and cut the crap is
  not personal, but there is _nothing_ technical in your increasingly
  pathetic ranting and raving, and nothing to make you stop posting this
  crap.  Nobody believes you, nor should they.  The problem is that you are
  such a pathologically _dishonest_ person that you have become unable to
  distinguish what you want to believe from reality as you and others see
  it.  There is no truth to you, there is only John Foderaro's _personal_
  "reality", with a significant population of monsters under your bed.

  Pointing out to you that something you said is _wrong_ and misrepresents
  someone does not work the same way it does on normal people, because you
  will (1) never grasp that it was wrong, and (2) never admit to it even if
  you do.  You have been caught lying and misrepresenting several times,
  yet you keep clamoring for "evidence", just like a person who knows he is
  guilty as hell yet hopes nobody can prove it in court.  When you get the
  evidence you ask for, you just shut up for a while.  Several people have
  pointed this out in this very newsgroup, yet nothing happens from your
  end when they do.  This is _extremely_ suspicious.  It is if the _only_
  thing you are actually upset about is that your lies are being exposed,
  your destructiveness towards the standard upon which you and your company
  have decided to build your business.  Many _really_ bad guys react the
  same way when their criminal ways threaten to cease to pay off: They get
  really angry and blame those who exposed them, not themselves for having
  done something wrong all this time.  I am unfortunate enough to expose
  bad guys and frauds like you, so a lot of you think that it helps to
  attack me.  It probably would in real life, which is why some of the bad
  guys clearly think in terms of _physical_ bullies.  But that is not it,
  and you guys know it: You cannot avoid knowing that all that happens here
  is that I post my opinions and you get really, seriously mad with rage.

  Why do you guys not figure it out?  You expose yourself by getting mad,
  not by what I say.  Let me give you an example of how this stark insanity
  of yours works:

| And who is Marc Spitzer anyway?  There seems to be no record of you on
| the net before the year 2000.  In the past Erik Naggum has deceived the
| members of this newsgroup by posting under aliases (one we know for sure
| about was something like "GI Gunmaker").  You come out of nowhere and
| make all these moralistic claims while posting lies and hypocrisy to stir
| up trouble.  This is the  same writing style used by Erik Naggum.  I
| believe that you are either another Naggum pseudonym or are posting
| messages on behalf of him.

  It is now clear that John K. Foderaro has become completely insane.

  The observant reader will also notice that this _amazing_ paragraph just
  happened to be in the same posting as his call for claims that he lies.
  That is so ... _unexpected_ from him.  Who could have seen this coming?
  Well, I could, because I no longer expect him to be able to distinguish
  between what goes on within his deranged mind and what he observes from
  the outside world.  Such psychotic episodes have been increasing in rate
  lately, but people close to him have already suggested he gets committed
  to a mental hospital and somebody who cares about him should help him.

  The above quoted paragraph makes it evident that he has finally lost his
  mind, or, with his own wording about people he disagrees with: "you
  either didn't have the ability to reason or were just trying to make
  trouble".  And I thought he was critical of such "language", but he is
  evidently exempt from his own moralistic rules of polite behavior.  But
  why the exclusive choice?  In his case, it is clearly inclusive.  It was
  clear to me that he was irrational and had a dysfunctional brain the
  first time I heard him ranting and raving about upper-case symbol names,
  the _conspiracy_ in the committee against him, and his strong disrespect
  for central members of the committee, not to mention the whole political
  process, which a selfish, short-sighted person would fail to understand
  is necessary.  I mean, just make the problems go away as far as you see
  it.  After all, this is a technical problem, right?  E.g., Allegro CL has
  a :case-insensitive argument to apropos, which defaults to nil -- which
  is pretty silly considering the intensity he feels about the case issue;
  it is as if he _wants_ to be enraged about this upper-case symbol names,
  instead of actually solving it, like a rebel without a clue.

<technical
  As for the case-sensitive-lower issue, a readtable-case value of :invert
  _actually_ works for those who are able to deal with _technical_ issues,
  and as for the return-value of symbol-name, the solution is quite simple:
  new, improved versions of the functions that interact with symbol-names.
  E.g., in a parody of the if* stunt, we could have intern*, find-symbol*,
  and symbol-name*, which would maintain and return a lower-case version of
  the all-upper-case symbols and vice versa.  This could be accomplished
  within a conforming Common Lisp system, it would be transparent to those
  who still want conforming behavior, and lower-case and upper-case code
  can coexist in the same system without needing to convert code to only
  one mode.  The whole "mode" and conversion business is a way of locking
  people into a bogus and gratuitous deviation from the standard, to give
  them something that on the surface looks desirable (especially since the
  stuff that was necessary to make standard solutions work were left buggy
  for more than a decade) in exchange for dropping _standard_ Common Lisp.

  Standards _should_ be followed, but _only_ if they are written by John
  Foderaro.  The same patholocal egocentricism is present in most of what
  you do -- when I argue Franz Inc should not publish your crufty code, you
  take it to mean that _you_ should not _use_ your silly if* stunt, even
  claim that that is what I _said_.  This world is all about John Foderaro,
  and whatever he does is right, even if he is so critical of others who do
  something much less vile than he does that he calls on the community to
  denounce their behavior in his typical mistargeted moralism.  I should be
  lambasted for being rude and to disrespect John Foderaro, but John
  Foderaro is free to misbehave without lower bounds towards me and to
  other people.  It is no wonder that this pathological liar usually only
  finds hypocrisy to criticize others for, if only by stretching the facts
  so much they would have snapped, at least in a mind that had not itself
  snapped.

  Funny you should ask...  But it clearly applies only to your own.

| You may note that one of the example files (puzzle.cl), a very cool
| aserve application written by another developer at Franz (Charley Cox)
| actually uses when and unless.  Some day I plan on converting that over
| to use if* but I don't feel an urgency to do so.

  Someone should convert the "ported" AllegroServes and other open source
  from your end to use the standard conditionals, because what good _is_
  having a community standard if one does not follow it?  Publishing source
  code for others to read is all about letting people who want to find good
  programming style and quality design learn by example, after they have
  found textbooks teaching or standards defining the language they are
  reading -- that is not what they find in if*-infested code.  If they have
  to deal with some wacky old historical accident that transports them back
  to pre-Common Lisp times with every programmer's own version of basic
  language constructs, we have gained nothing with the standard, and that
  is clearly the _purpose_ of the if* form.  We were _supposed_ to have
  progressed beyond random user macros for fundamental control structures
  with the establishment of the standard, but some have still not accepted
  it.  I do not think they should be rewarded for their retro-rebellion and
  nostalgic pining for a time when we _had_ no standards.

  The Open Source community does not have to accept anyone's very personal
  "coding standard", especially when it proves to be a _liability_ to the
  community.  Quite the contrary, the Open Source community should strive
  to make its projects acceptable to as many people as possible, to be
  inclusive of tastes -- which, contrary to the childish whining of those
  who have no concern for anything but their _own_ taste, to mature people
  means finding a point of _common_ agreement that offends as few people as
  possible and thus allows people to make _serious_ improvements instead of
  petty ones that only annoy lots of people.  One such obvious common point
  of agreement is the _standard_, within its scope; outside its scope, we
  must strive to find other points of agreements, obviously, but still the
  respect for such agreements must be established and maintained.

  The Open Source community is already loaded with political issues that
  tend to exclude people who could have contributed serious improvmenets,
  so finding the intersection of those who accept the political issues and
  those who accept the irrationality of refusing to deal with standard
  conditionals and community-accepted coding practices, will of necessity
  be quite hard.  Furthermore, does any part of the Open Source community
  _really_ want to marry into the anti-standard political agenda of someone
  who expresses strong disdain for _many_ clauses and committee decisions,
  disrespect for and hostility towards central committee members, and who
  refers to the upper-case symbol names of the standard as "braindamaged
  mode" as opposed to the "modern mode" of his own design?  I certainly do
  not want to help further such agendas, so if I find bugs or some features
  I do not like, I just drop it or do not use it at all, just like some
  Microsoft "operating system", rather than try to make it better, which
  would simply mean making it better at hurting what I value.  Sharing code
  with people who have agendas that are contrary to mine would be self-
  destructive -- I _really_ want ANSI Common Lisp to survive, and more than
  that, to be _the_ point of agreement for the whole commnunity.  I want to
  work _within_ the accepted procedures to make changes or improvements if
  any are necessary, not undermine the standard by changing the language
  people see, indeed, to make sure that _textbooks_ and _references_ on
  Common Lisp really teach people the language they can expect to see
  _used_.  By changing the conditionals, which John Foderaro says he thinks
  of as _fundamental_ to a language, he exposes people to a _different_
  language, regardless of how much he keeps claiming that he is writing and
  using "Common Lisp".

  Getting rid of the personal idiosyncrasies of individual contributors
  does in fact improve both readablity and acceptability of the source code
  to a large number of people, just as it does for prose text.  As I have
  pointed out repeatedly, publishers and _responsible_ companies ensure
  that their _published_ materials follow standards that are far more
  _inclusive_ than some "style" of a wacky employee, because the use of
  slang, sociolects, etc, in technical documentation, code, and the like
  _excludes_ all those who do not appreciate it, who do not want to be
  members of a freak show just because they want to use or take part in
  something.  Considering the "sterility" of technical documentation and
  the sheer absence of "personality" in such material, one has to grasp the
  intent to communicate the ideas as cleanly as possible, understandable by
  as many people as possible, and thus is nearly devoid of idioms, local
  vocabulary, slang, poetic expressions, etc.  It is considered hard to
  write good technical documentation because it has be "alive" despite all
  the usual means to keep prose text alive.  But not only technical stuff,
  _every_ author has to deal with the kind of "ego bruises" that come from
  dealing with a serious publisher's copy editor, and most authors who are
  serious about being published _understand_ that their editors know a lot
  more about this than they do as authors -- after all, the author knows
  the subject matter while the editors know the publishing business, and
  that includes the language to use.  Those who are too stupid and arrogant
  to listen to expertise, who refuse to consult dictionaries and style
  guides or who refuse to learn from those who have been published, do not
  get published -- it is a matter of "I know everything best" versus "I
  know _my_ stuff".  The Net has unfortunately had a dramatic effect on the
  publication rate of trash and documents that scream "Look at my personal
  style!" instead of whatever they were trying to communicate, the same way
  many documents screamed "Look at what my Macintosh can do!" back when
  that was the measure of ridiculous hipness.  But still we have publishing
  houses that manage to break in their authors and cause the whole stable
  of authors to agree to publish books using the same style, the same font,
  the same layout, etc, even though you can be dead certain that very few
  of them would have chosen it on their own, and some of them probably had
  a pet style that did _not_ get used.  Those who go bananas over the use
  of certain quotation marks, say, are simply dropped by the publisher.  A
  renegade author costs so much more for these publishers that you have be
  a _real_ big name to pull any such stunts.

  There are parts of Common Lisp that one Common Lisp programmer or another
  most probably does not like, would have designed differently, etc, but
  out of deference to the community of readers of _published_ code, they
  understand that it is actually _preferable_ for their _own_ personal
  goals to work towards community coherence over getting their personal ego
  stroked, because that means fighting people all the time, every time.

  Consult a psychiatrist, John Foderaro.  This is not a support group for
  fucked-up mental cases like you who refuse to seek help, but bother a lot
  people with what could be easily cured.  Behaving the way you keep doing
  is like a moron who refuses to visit a dentist for his tooth-aches and
  blames someone else for his pains and then takes it out on them at random.

    I have no doubt that in your mind you actually believe all
those things you said about me from and which you drew your conclusions.
I live in what's called the real world though.   In my world you
can find references and actually prove things. In the past
I've asked you to back up statements you've claimed I've made
and each and every time you have failed to do so (because you couldn't do
so).

For example:

http://groups.google.com/groups?q=g:thl1251669294d&hl=en&selm=MPG.15f...
06%40news.dnai.com

 I have no interest in learning about the world inside your head. It looks
like a very dark place.

 I'm sure that everyone on this newsgroup is sick of this 'discussion'
between you and me.

 Let's just call it over.  

John is the manager at Franz who is responable for seeing that you
don't fuck up in comp.lang.lisp and make the company look stupid to its
customers current and future on vacation this week?  If he is sick I
hope he gets well real soon and shut you up again.  You are most
assuredly best when quite.

Any time someone comes by with some code contribution where the "IF*
issue" comes up, the party responsible for encouraging making up such
variant "wanna-be-standards" will continue to be you, and any relevant
controversy will _obviously_ have to swirl around you.