THIS REPOSITORY REPRESENTS A WORK IN PROGRESS. UNLESS YOU KNOW WHAT YOU ARE DOING, WE RECOMMEND THAT YOU MAKE NO ATTEMPT TO CLONE THIS REPOSITORY AND CERTAINLY NO ATTEMPT TO BUILD THE FINAL DOCUMENT. Ultimately, this repository is meant to contain a specification of an improvement of the Common Lisp standard. The new language is called "Well Specified Common Lisp". It will be abbreviated WSCL, and it should be pronounced like "whistle". The objective of this work is that a conforming implementation of WSCL is also a conforming implementation of the Common Lisp standard. Furthermore, most of the improvements will be such that a modern conforming implementation of Common Lisp will already be a conforming implementation of WSCL, or will require relatively few modifications in order to become one. This objective may sound too modest to be of any importance, but in fact that is not the case. The fact is that the Common Lisp standard allows considerable freedom for conforming implementations. Often, this freedom takes the form of some behavior being unspecified or undefined. There might be several reasons for the Common Lisp standard to allow this freedom. One reason was no doubt for backward compatibility with existing Lisp implementations. Another was probably uncertainty as to whether a more strict specification might harm performance. Since the Common Lisp standard was created, there have been significant improvements in language implementation resulting from research in this domain, and also significant improvements in the capability of processors. Furthermore, since the creation of the standard, many high-quality Common Lisp implementations have been created, and those implementations are now the norm, so that considerations of backward compatibility should be discussed relative to those implementations rather then Lisp systems that preceded them. For this work, we aim to proceed as follows: * We start with the dpANS document of the draft specification of the Common Lisp language. This document is written in plain TeX, and is designed so that each chapter can be compiled separately. * We convert this document to a single LaTeX document, using semi-automatic and manual techniques. We make sure that semantic markup is preserved or improved. We isolate macros for typographic markup from macros for semantic markup. And we create new categories of LaTeX markup that will simplify the ultimate parsing of the final LaTeX sources into other formats such as HTML. * We may eliminate some typographical markup that interferes with semantic markup, especially when the aesthetic value of the typographical markup is dubious. * We create a Unix Makefile that creates a PDF file of the complete document. When all this work is done, we can proceed with the improvements. * For each modified paragraph, we move the original paragraph to a so-called "end note", for which there is an available LaTeX package. This way, it becomes easy to see that a paragraph differs from the original and it becomes easy to consult the original paragraph. If only a small subset of the sentences in a paragraph have been modified, the note may contain only the modified sentences. * New paragraphs are marked as such so that it is visually obvious that such a paragraph does not exist in the original Common Lisp standard. Even though using LaTeX is definitely not ideal for creating a new standard, we decided to use it nevertheless, rather than any of a dozen or so alternatives for the following reasons: * It has all the functionality we need, including software for correctly formatting bibliography references. * Since the dpANS is written in TeX, most of the text can be included without modification, at least in an initial version.
robert-strandh/Well-Specified-Common-Lisp
A specification of an improvement to the Common Lisp standard
TeX