Report on trip to Japan

[Guy Steele <gls@THINK-AQUINAS.ARPA>]

Well, my face is red.  I did not get to Japan after all.  When I
presented my passport at the airport gate in Seattle, I was informed
that the passport contained no visa for travel to Japan.  Japan requires
that a visa be obtained in advance of travel.  I didn't know this (none
of the European countries I have visited has required a visa), and none
of the many people helping me (and who did many other things to make the
trip possible) thought to advise me to get a visa.  My problem occurred
on a Saturday morning, and no Japanese consulate would be open until
Monday, which would be too late; and so my trip was cancelled.  Too bad.
This is especially disappointing to me as I had hoped to have some
discussions about means of international cooperation in the development
of Common Lisp.  I may be able to try again next spring.

Nevertheless, I am grateful to all of you who supplied me with
implementation data for the survey I conducted in preparation for the
trip.  I think the survey was well worth doing.  I have distributed it
to this mailing list.  Since then a couple more entries have come in,
and I will distribute this addendum in a few days.  (Any more out
there?)

It was suggested to me that it might be useful to publish this survey in
some forum such as SIGPLAN Notices or the SIGART newsletter.  However, I
made a specific statement up front about the uses to which I would put
the collected data, and I would not feel right about publishing it
without first checking back with all of you who supplied the data.
Questions:

(1) Do you feel it would be useful to publish the collected survey data?
(2) If you supplied data, would you consent to using the data for this
    purpose?  (Perhaps you may wish to supply a corrected version now that
    you have seen all the entries together?)

There remains the question of whether such a journal would wish to publish
the list, but that's another matter.