[netsettler]

Standards organizations periodically insist on updates in order for a document to be considered active. This assures things don't decay but it can also be a way to churn business.

But also there are sometimes typos and other details to fix, noticed through use, which I thin was the case here (though I'd have to go back and look at records I don't have at my fingertips to be sure, so please don't hold me to that--these remarks are extemporaneous, written on a subway while traveling), and yes there is an ISLISP community even if not at the scale of the CL community. One of the effects of ISLISP was to legitimize various dialects of Lisp that did not want or need to be Common Lisp. By being ISLISP compliant, they have some degree of interchange capability with one another.

ANSI CL has things it could fix, but the problem is that you can't open the process for edits merely to fix those things. Any opening of it to small edits opens the floodgates for many kinds of changes, and it might destabilize it. (There is a strong analogy to be made with having a second constitutional convention for the US Constitution, by the way.)

SO opening for edits and improvements might seem benign, but understand that in order to have voting standing (something there is a HUGE rulebook to assure), you have to be a member. ANSI's claim of fairness, which is all that stands between its entire business model and an antitrust suit, relies on fairness. Normally, companies cannot collude, but standards are a deliberate mechanism to avoid that, and they rely on strict application of rules to achieve a constructive notion of fairness, since any intangible notion of fairness would be untestable.

But it's pretty high overhead to have membership. Certainly it's expensive for individuals to be members in ANSI and it's left to mostly whichever companies go, so although the intent is fairness, in my personal view it's very difficult to assure fairness exactly because of the rules that try to assure it. It's almost a catch-22. The very fact of the rules means people with should-be standing are locked out by cost, and so in practice all members who would want to be represented are not going to be, and the people making the decisions will be those who can afford membership.

In the international arena, where the members are countries, there are similar issues though only countries can be members. As discussed in Untold Story, there is a risk of single individuals in countries that don't really care about a standard getting the same vote as a country like the US that might care a lot (or vice versa, perhaps, for other standards--I apologize for the US-centric nature of that remark, but the problem is quite general and I just perceive and express it as a US issue when really it's the same for everyone rule-wise and it's the business world and/or wealth and/or activity that is unevenly divided).

In fact, I think the ISLISP world is pretty fairly administered and I don't think there was much debate about the 2007 update. It was smoothly and easily handled by Taiichi Yuasa. I did editorial work to help with that.

[groovy2shoes]

> One of the effects of ISLISP was to legitimize various dialects of Lisp that did not want or need to be Common Lisp. By being ISLISP compliant, they have some degree of interchange capability with one another.

Which dialects are those? As far as I can tell, the main non-CL influences recognized by the ISLISP spec (EuLisp, Le-Lisp, and Scheme) all pretty much ignored ISLISP entirely (except for perhaps EuLisp, which may or may not have been canceled to make way for ISLISP... I'm still investigating the history of that one... in any case, EuLisp was very different from ISLISP).

At this point in time, the only ISLISP implementation I can seem to find is OpenLisp from Eligis, who was previously a Le-Lisp vendor. Here and there, I've found references to about three other implementations, but they all seem to have been wiped off the Web and no longer exist.

On a tangent, EuLisp was absolutely beautiful, and it's a real shame that it was never finished. It also had some "new" things to offer the world of standardized Lisps, whereas ISLISP really doesn't offer anything that couldn't already be found in Common Lisp.

[kazinator]

Dialects of Lisp that don't want to be Common Lisp probably also don't to be ISLISP even less.

If I'm a hacker with ideas about implementing Lisp, I'm not about to whip out ISLISP and conform to it as a starting point. I'm going to invent everything from scratch and kind of just borrow things here and there from other dialects.

Therefore, its existence has no bearing on legitimizing what I'm doing. In fact, the existence of yet one more standard that I'm not conforming to is only undermining my legitimacy. ("There are seventeen standards; why are you inventing something new? Must be not-invented-here syndrome!")