🚀 go-pugleaf

In article <1389@quintus.UUCP>, dave@quintus.UUCP (David Bowen) writes:
> In article <3319@goanna.cs.rmit.oz.au> Richard A. O'Keefe writes:

> >The ISO committee decided that they didn't _want_ me to be involved in
> >the construction of a standard, so I can be as vehement as I like.

> The ISO committee decided no such thing.  Roger Scowen,
> chair of the committee and one of the project editors, has repeatedly 
> stated that he wants your involvement.

Roger Scowen is not the committee.  The proposal to have me involved in
the standard was in fact rejected by a meeting of the ISO committee, or
so I have been informed.  ALP(UK) and BSI say they are still interested,
but again, they are not ISO.

This newsgroup is not a meeting of the ISO or any other standards
committee.  What is proper/helpful in this newsgroup is not necessarily
what is proper/helpful at a standards meeting.  I really don't understand
why an expression of my personal preference about what should be in the
standard is being flamed, before flaming someone with no power or
influence, why not flame some of the ISO delegates who in attempting to
make sweeping changes have held things up so long?  I was, after all,
saying no more than that a feature which is _present_ in a Quintus product
would be good to have in a standard, it's hardly a sweeping change...

> >That means dropping floats, streams, and error handling.
> >Going for a "minimal" standard was a very silly idea back in 1985;

> I don't mean THAT minimal.

But extreme minimality has long been a goal of the BSI/ISO committee,
one of the few explicit principles that has ever been adopted.  That's
why they have @> /2 but not compare/3, and surely that's why they
recently dropped strings.

> Floats and streams should clearly be in the standard.
Why is it "clear" that floats and streams should be in but
correct integer arithmetic should not?  Providing correct integer
arithmetic requires no changes to the syntax of the language or
the number, names, or interfaces of built-in predicates, and the
absence of machine-dependence would make the standard _simpler_
and user programs more portable.

I'm not against floats or streams, far from it.  But let's get real
about this:  writing the streams _proposal_ that Dave Bowen and I
put together required more hard thought than _implementing_ bignums.
(The file LONG.PL in the DEC-10 Prolog library is in the public
domain, and could be used behind-the-scene in exactly the same way
that ALS Prolog on PCs implements double precision floats as
compound terms behind-the-scene.)

> >(I warn readers, putting together a workable
> >specification for floating-point arithmetic is _not_ a trivial matter;
> >it's not a _small_ extension to DEC-10 Prolog if you want to get it right.)

> Thanks for the warning.  I'm sure that the ISO committee would welcome a
> proposal from you on this.

I _sent_ a draft proposal last year.  It's available as an Auckland University
Computer Science report.  It needs work.  In particular, it needs to be
reconsidered in the light of the proposal currently before ANSI for a
meta-standard for the floating-point part of programming language standards.

> I think that there are a number of other features for which equally strong
> arguments could be made.  Two questions are:  how long do we want to go on
> debating/specifying all these extra features, and how much burden do we want to
> put on implementors.  You may argue that the latter should not be a
> consideration, but a lot of implementors are represented on the committee.

I keep on stressing that bignums are *EASY* to implement.  How that gets
perceived as "arguing that [the burden put on implementors] should not be
a consideration" is a mystery to me.  There has never been ANY *reported*
debate about bignums from the standards committees, in the documents I have
received in BSI/ISO mailings, I have never seen any argument whatsoever
advanced against correct integer arithmetic.

> >What's needed is
> >a committee who are vehemently interested in doing a high-quality job.

> You should start attending the meetings.

(a) When I worked at Quintus, some people senior to me repeatedly told me
    to stop wasting time reading and responding to BSI/ISO documents.
(b) Now that I am working at an Australian University, my income is
    approximately 60% of what it was at Quintus.  Meetings are timed for
    the convenience of Northen Hemisphere delegates, so I'd have to take
    time (and pay) off to attend them.  I am not _motivated_ by money,
    but it _does_ affect what I can afford to do.

I would like to point out that this is precisely why there is so little
user involvement in the Prolog standard, the vast majority of the people
who will be affected by the standard cannot afford to go to the meetings.
I have in the past volunteered in this newsgroup to manage an Australian
mail server for standards documents if given machine-readable copies
that could be made available that way.  I remember how it _was_ feasible
for ordinary people to participate usefully in the Ada standardisation
process, and I'm aware of how ordinary people are currently able to find
out what the current state of the Ada9X work is and to ask questions and
make suggestions.  Making the information legally available for mail-
server access and comment would be a lot more useful than telling people
to go to the meetings.  (Unless that was an offer to pay my expenses?)

-- 
"private morality" is an oxymoron, like "peaceful war".