CDR 4: Common Lisp Document Repository (revised)

Authors

Marc Battyani, Pascal Costanza, Arthur Lemmens, Edi Weitz

Submitter

Pascal Costanza, for contact use cdr-discuss@common-lisp.net

Abstract

The Common Lisp Document Repository is a repository of documents that are of interest to the Common Lisp community. The most important property of a CDR document is that it will never change: if you refer to it, you can be sure that your reference will always refer to exactly the same document.

Rationale

There have been a number of attempts to establish a standardization process for Common Lisp after it has been officially published as an ANSI standard. The ANSI standardization was very costly and very time consuming (according to a comment by Kent Pitman's on comp.lang.lisp, it took nearly 10 years and at least $400K).

The goal of the Common Lisp Document Repository is to be more light-weight and more efficient. We focus on one aspect of standardization: the ability to refer to a specification document in an unambiguous way.

The Common Lisp Document Repository intentionally does not define a process for coming up with specifications or any other means to guarantee some level of quality of the submitted documents. Instead, we aim for a community-driven, decentralized approach to come up, discuss and finalize specifications. In this sense, we only provide the services of librarians.

We hope that the Common Lisp Document Repository has the potential to prove useful in establishing new de-facto standards, and to serve as a stepping stone for more formal standardizations in the long run.

The Document

Changes

Status

Final

Remarks

This CDR supersedes CDR 0.