Franz Inc's attitude to the standard -- a request for clarification
Erik Naggum
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
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