🚀 go-pugleaf

In article <2643@munnari.oz.au> ok@cs.mu.oz.au (Richard O'Keefe) writes:
>The internal politics of WG17 are quite irrelevant.
>The point is, *I* don't get a vote.  Lee Naish doesn't get a vote.  Rick
>Muggridge doesn't get a vote.  The team at HP don't get a vote.
>Virtually *all* of the people who are using Common Prolog systems (that
>is, virtually all of the people who will be affected by WG17) have no
>representation at all.  The Swiss are pushing for this and the French
>are pushing for that (according to N40 they want variables to begin only
>with underscores), but many nations are not represented at all (there is
>no New Zealand representation, for example), but it isn't REALLY "the
>Swiss" or "the French" but the particular people who managed to get
>themselves appointed as national representatives.

Having recently attended my first WG17 meeting, as a U.S. delegate, I
think I should comment on this.

If there are people in Australia and New Zealand who care about the Prolog
standard, they should consider trying to get their official national
standards bodies to nominate delegates to WG17.  The usual problem with
this is that the delegates have to be able to put the necessary time into
the work, and their employers have to be willing and able to pay to send
them to meetings.

Those who are not able to get direct representation through their national
standards organization should not give up.  Since the standardization
process works by consensus, one vote more or less is not usually the issue.
What really matters is convincing people.  Possible avenues for doing this
are writing to this net or sending "personal contributions" to Roger
Scowen, the convenor of WG17.  Roger's address is

    International Organization for Standardization
    National Physical Laboratory
    Teddington, Middlesex
    U.K.

Personal contributions are distributed by Roger to the members of WG17 and
other interested parties, and they are discussed the next time that the
working group meets.  (Meetings are held every 6 months or so; the next one
is scheduled for April.)  To be most effective, contributions should be
concise, clear and constructive.  Long diatribes which defame the morals
and the competence of the members of the committee are counter-productive.

>Let's be honest about this:  democracy is rule BY the same people
>who are affected.  Some of us (like me) can't vote for a representative
>even in principle.  Those of us who belong to countries which are
>"represented" did not get any opportunity to pick their "representatives".

This last statement is not true in general.  In the U.S., at least, the
future delegates to WG17 will be chosen by the ANSI working group on Prolog
standardization.  Membership of this working group is open to anyone who
lives in the U.S., or works for a U.S.-based organization, and is able to
attend the meetings.  This group has not really got started yet: there was
an ad-hoc meeting of interested people at IJCAI in August.  The first real
meeting is expected to be in Washington D.C. in January or February.
Information about this meeting will be posted on the net.

>The one and only
>legitimate concern of the committee is to standardise the Prolog
>programming language more or less as it stands.  What Prolog _is_ is
>not a matter for philosophy, but for empirical investigation.  

I totally agree with this and also think that it is a valid criticism of
the work done by the committee so far.  I think that there is a tendency to
argue about what is the "right" feature in order to get away from people
simply arguing for standardization of their own favourite Prolog dialect.
From this point, it is very easy to inadvertently cross the dividing line
from standardizing to designing a language.  On the other hand,
standardization *entirely* by empirical investigation is not practical.
Would we standardize on whatever is used by the largest number of people?
Would we include Turbo Prolog?

>The people on the committee get paid to do what they
>do.  I have not.  I've put a couple of weeks' work into reading and
>commenting on stuff this year, all of it unpaid.

As far as I could tell, most of the people on the committee are actually
paid mainly to do other things than standardize Prolog.  Generally
speaking, it is a background activity, presumably because employers do not
think it sufficiently important to be a full-time job.  I think that this
is a problem, and it is the main reason why Richard has been able to point
out so many inconsistencies and errors in the draft standard.  Maybe it
means that it is still too early for a Prolog standard.  

WG17 is going to carry on anyway.  For WG17 to start doing a better job, as
Richard wants, we need more people to do more work.  I hope that we can get
together a vigorous ANSI group and so have a substantial influence on WG17.
We need more Prolog users to get involved - these days the standardization
effort is heavily weighted towards Prolog implementors.  And I hope that
Richard will get involved, as a consultant to Quintus, in helping to forge
an ANSI position.

We don't yet have any mailing list organized for the ANSI working group.
I suggest that for the time being we use comp.lang.prolog for discussion
of standardization issues.