Talk:Common Lisp the Language

regarding the ANSI standard. Peter Seibel in Practical Common Lisp [1] says:

Another classic reference is Common Lisp: The Language by Guy Steele (Digital Press, 1984 and 1990). The first edition, a.k.a. CLtL1, was the de facto standard for the language for a number of years. While waiting for the official ANSI standard to be finished, Guy Steele--who was on the ANSI committee--decided to release a second edition to bridge the gap between CLtL1 and the eventual standard. The second edition, now known as CLtL2, is essentially a snapshot of the work of the standardization committee taken at a particular moment in time near to, but not quite at, the end of the standardization process. Consequently, CLtL2 differs from the standard in ways that make it not a very good day-to-day reference. It is, however, a useful historical document, particularly because it includes documentation of some features that were dropped from the standard before it was finished as well as commentary that isn't part of the standard about why certain features are the way they are.

--MarSch 14:55, 18 February 2007 (UTC)

CLTL vs CLTL2

I think it's quite unfortunate that Common Lisp the Language (also known as CLTL) and Common Lisp the Language, Second Edition (also known as CLTL2) are merged into a single entry. The problem is one of naming. In fact, these are quite distinct documents with very different attributes, and cross-references from other places in Wikipedia to one or the other of these have substantively different meanings that go far beyond the mere change in technical details. I added some text to the X3J13 entry that expands on this a little bit, but the essence is this: CLTL was a committee document and CLTL2 is Steele's personal work. Hence, statements about Common Lisp the Language differ widely in their truth value not just because the technical details vary but because the political context varies as well. Although Common Lisp's heritage is perhaps less important to the average person on the street than the heritage of the United States, the a structural analogy would be if Thomas Jefferson or John Adams had gone on to write a second document called The Constitution of the United States, Revised Edition, as his own private work and Wikipedia had thought it important to merge both that and the real Constitution into the same entry because they had textual similarity of name and/or the same human author. I note that FORTRAN 66 and FORTRAN 77 are included under the same entry, so one might argue that this is just how things are done (even though I lament that choice as well), but ALGOL 68 is rightly separated from ALGOL 60, so the rule must not be absolute. I'm not going to bother doing any further leg work on this, but I wanted to log my strong disappointment with the status quo on this matter, just in case someone else with more knowledge of wikipolitics wants to take this up. It makes it quite difficult to write correct text with appropriate cross-references. Having to write [Common Lisp the Language|Common Lisp the Language, Second Edition] all the while knowing that when the person clicks through to this "best available" reference, they'll end up at the entry for the wrong dialect is too depressing. It often leaves me throwing up my hands and just saying "It's too hard to untangle, why should I bother?" That the Wikipedia entries for "Common Lisp" (a language) and "ANSI Common Lisp" (one of several dialects of Common Lisp) are merged this way cause similar problems. --Kent Pitman, Project Editor for ANSI Common Lisp (Netsettler (talk) 01:54, 15 November 2009 (UTC))

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