2 ms·

Stallman was member of X3J13? What did he do there?

• kazinator 10y ago
  Am I mis-remembering something? [update: no] Richard Gabriel's and Guy Steele's Evolution of Lisp lists Stallman among the people in a "Common Lisp Group". See: https://www.dreamsongs.com/Files/Hopl2.pdf https://www.dreamsongs.com/Files/Hopl2.pdf (P. 21) Steele's CLTL (1) gives a list of people who were involved in the actual ANSI XJ13, but Stallman isn't listed. Stallman, however, is credited in that very same book and section as having worked on an implementation of the "New Error System" (NES) as follows: "A reimplementation of the NES for non-Symbolics Lisp Machine dialects (MIT, LMI, and TI) was done at MIT by Richard M. Stallman. During the process of that reimplementation, some conceptual changes were made which have significantly influenced the Common Lisp Condition System." There you go: Stallman is noted as having been part of an early "Common Lisp Group", and did some implementation work which influenced the CL condition system.
  • lispm 10y ago
    This was not ANSI CL. This was CLtL1 Common Lisp. X3J13 was formed a few years later. I never heard of him being active in X3J13. Stallman never did much work with or on CL. I never had the impression that Stallman was very active in CL design. The mailing list protocols would clear this up... Stallman actually does not like CL and has critized CL features many times and prevented them to be used in GNU Emacs. The NES was done at Symbolics. Stallman likely tried to copy it for LMI, while he was fighting against Symbolics. But that phase did not last long.
  • deleted 10y ago
    [deleted]
  • lispm 10y ago
    On the Common Lisp mailing list there are 30 mails from RMS. His participation ended in 83. Before CLtL1 was published and way before X3J13 was started. I'd say RMS was never a member of X3J13.