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Standardization

A major success is that there is a standard Lisp-Common Lisp. Many observers today wish there were a simpler, smaller, cleaner Lisp that could be standardized, but the Lisp that we have today that is ready for standardization is Common Lisp. This isn't to say that a better Lisp could not be standardized later, and certainly there should be. Furthermore, like any language, Common Lisp should be improved and changed as needs change.

Common Lisp started as a grassroots effort in 1981 after an ARPA-sponsored meeting held at SRI to determine the future of Lisp. At that time there were a number of Lisps in the US being defined and implemented by former MIT folks: Greenblatt (LMI), Moon and Weinreb (Symbolics), Fahlman and Steele (CMU), White (MIT), and Gabriel and Steele (LLNL). The core of the Common Lisp committee came from this group. That core was Fahlman, Gabriel, Moon, Steele, and Weinreb, and Common Lisp was a coalescence of the Lisps these people cared about.

There were other Lisps that could have blended into Common Lisp, but they were not so clearly in the MacLisp tradition, and their proponents declined to actively participate in the effort because they predicted success for their own dialects over any common lisp that was defined by the grassroots effort. Among these Lisps were Scheme, Interlisp, Franz Lisp, Portable Standard Lisp, and Lisp370.

And outside the US there were major Lisp efforts, including Cambridge Lisp and Le-Lisp. The humble US grassroots effort did not seek membership from outside the US, and one can safely regard that as a mistake. Frankly, it never occurred to the Common Lisp group that this purely American effort would be of interest outside the US, because very few of the group saw a future in AI that would extend the needs for a standard Lisp beyond North America.

Common Lisp was defined and a book published in 1984 called ``Common Lisp: the Language'' (CLtL). And several companies sprang up to put Common Lisp on stock hardware to compete against the Lisp machine companies. Within four years, virtually every major computer company had a Common Lisp that it had either implemented itself or private-labeled from a Common Lisp company.

In 1986, X3J13 was formed to produce an ANSI version of Common Lisp. By then it was apparent that there were significant changes required to Common Lisp to clean up ambiguities and omissions, to add a condition system, and to define object-oriented extensions.

After several years it became clear that the process of standardization was not simple, even given a mature language with a good definition. The specification of the Common Lisp Object System (CLOS) alone took nearly two years and seven of the most talented members of X3J13.

It also became apparent that the interest in international Lisp standardization was growing. But there was no heir apparent to Common Lisp. Critics of Common Lisp, especially those outside the US, focused on Common Lisp's failures as a practical delivery vehicle.

In 1988, an international working group for the standardization of Lisp was formed. That group is called WG16. Two things are absolutely clear: The near-term standard Lisp is Common Lisp; a longer-term standard that goes beyond Common Lisp is desirable.

In 1988, the IEEE Scheme working group was formed to produce an IEEE and possibly an ANSI standard for Scheme. This group completed its work in 1990, and the relatively small and clean Scheme is a standard.

Currently, X3J13 is less than a year away from a draft standard for ANSI Common Lisp; WG16 is stalled because of international bickering; Scheme has been standardized by IEEE, but it is of limited commercial interest.

Common Lisp is in use internationally, and serves at least as a de facto standard until the always contentious Lisp community agrees to work together.