Appropriate use of the Common-Lisp mailing list

[edsel!bhopal!jonl@labrea.stanford.edu (Jon L White)]

[Apologies again for replying several days late -- Lucid's link, at Stanford,
to the Internet seems to have been wedged since last Friday.]

Many other forums have seen fit to divide into two mailing lists -- one for
imlementational questions and another for general "information".  A paradigm
might be the BUG-<mumble> and INFO-<mumble> lists that sprang up around
MIT years ago (but maybe they weren't so successful? I dunno).

On the other hand, I don't find the (unnanounced and informal) change in 
purpose of the Common-Lisp@SU-AI mailing list to be so bad; my reasons
for tolerating it are:
   (1) It generates *** substantially less volume ** in my mail file than 
       it did one year ago, when every apostle from the MIT-AI lab (myself
       included) who imagined he was designing the world's greatest language
       felt it necessary to publicly argue every little issue that came up.
   (2) Users, who are not implementors, frequently have a different point
       of view as to what the important issues are, and they often read
       standardized documentation in a way different from "wizards"; I want
       to remain informed as to what they are thinking.

-- JonL --