Path: utzoo!utgpu!jarvis.csri.toronto.edu!cs.utexas.edu!uunet!mcsun!ukc!edcastle!aiai!jeff
From: jeff@aiai.ed.ac.uk (Jeff Dalton)
Newsgroups: comp.lang.prolog
Subject: Re: Netiquette (was: fun with WG17)
Message-ID: <1501@skye.ed.ac.uk>
Date: 3 Jan 90 19:25:44 GMT
References: <24701@cup.portal.com>
Reply-To: jeff@aiai.UUCP (Jeff Dalton)
Organization: AIAI, University of Edinburgh, Scotland
Lines: 53

In article <24701@cup.portal.com> pgl@cup.portal.com (Peter G Ludemann) writes:
>Many people, including myself, have been too busy to participate
>actively in the standardisation effort.  The active committee
>members deserve our thanks.  We may not like them, respect them,
>nor agree with them; but their long hours will benefit all Prolog
>users and vendors.

But that's one of the points in dispute: will the standard make things
better or worse?  It's certainly *possible* for it to make things worse.

I used to think it would be easy to make a Prolog standard.  The
language was fairly small and well-defined and there was already
a large degree of compatibility among implementations.  Moreover,
most of the incompatibility between the Edinburgh syntax Prologs
and the rest was just a matter of syntax.  Richard's approach to
standardization was designed to make those differences less
significant.

However, I'm disappointed to find that Prolog isn't easy to
standardize because people don't seem to be able to agree on
what the language should be like.  

The problem seems to be that too many people aren't sufficiently happy
with the language as it is and so want to change it in various ways.
Or else they want some interesting features from their version of
Prolog to be incorporated in the standard, even though the Prolog
community has not decided to move in that direction on their own.

I hope I'm wrong here, but that is how it often looks.

>- Remember that that this is comp.lang.PROLOG, not
>  comp.lang.EDINBURGH nor comp.lang.OKEEFE.

Richard has been somewhat unreasonable in this discussion, but so have
some of the people on the other side.  (Remember this has been going
on for a couple of years now.)  On the whole, I think Richard has been
a big plus for this newsgroup.

>  - 2500 years of philosophers haven't produced a universally
>    acceptable definition of "democracy".

The standardization process is certainly less democratic then we
might like.  For example, it is biased in favor of people who can
afford to attend meetings.  It's not necessary to fight over
definitions of "democracy" to make a point of this sort.

>  - Some things can't be resolved in this newsgroup.  That's why the
>    standardisation committee has meetings.

But it would be good if it were possible to participate in the
process, at least to some extent, by e-mail.  The various groups
concerned with Lisp standardization have benefited immensely from
this.