Yellow pages

[Scott E. Fahlman <Fahlman at Cmu-20c>]

Well, as I have always envisioned it, many yellow pages things (LOOP,
Flavors, CGOL, bigfloats with precision hacking) will be portable Common
Lisp packages that will work in any Common Lisp.  Others (a "universal"
menu system, for example) will provide a common Lispy interface, but
will exist in different versions for different implementations: one
might do menus (as well as is possible) on a 24x80 ASCII screen, another
might do menus on a 3600 with mouse selection, another might use audio
I/O, etc.  Finally, the yellow pages would contain some stuff that is
only for one implementation: a communication package for VAX Unix, for
example.  The documentation would clearly incidate which sort of thing
each package is, and things would be organized so that the universal
packages (that we want people to play with) are not hidden among the
system-dependent hacks.

In this way, I think we retain many of the best features of the
traditional route by which things find their way into Lisp, without as
much chaos as we see currently.  First, someone writes a package for his
own use, then shares it privately with some friends, then cleans it up
and documents it and submits it to the yellow pages, and then, if it
catches on with almost everyone, it goes into the language proper.  The
only novel item here is that we exert some quality control at the point
of entry to the yellow pages.

The yellow pages librarian cannot reject a package because he doesn't
like what it does, but only on the grounds that it is not adequately
documented or that the code is buggy or unmaintainable.  The code in the
yellow pages library must either be public domain or there must be
explicit permission to distribute it together with the rest of the
library.  I would guess that Symbolics, DEC, 3RCC, and others would
also have their own proprietary libraries, modelled after the yellow
pages, of things that they want only thier own customers to have;
hopefully this won't get out of hand and all vendors will realize the
benefits of commonality within the common Lisp community for
utility-like things.

-- Scott