various: arithmetic; commonlisp broadcasts

[Kim.fateman at Berkeley]

seem to include token representatives from berkeley (jkf) and utah (dm).
I think that including fateman@berkeley and griss@utah, too, would be nice.

I noticed in the the interlisp representative's report (the first to arrive
in "clear text" (not press format), that arithmetic needs are being
dictated in such a way as to be "as much as you would want for an
algebraic manipulation system such as Macsyma."   Since ratios and
complex numbers are not supported in the base Maclisp, I wonder why
they would be considered important to have in the base common lisp?

Personally, having the common lisp people dictate the results of
elementary functions, the semantics of bigfloat (what happened to
bigfloat? Is it gone?), single and double...
and such, seems overly ambitious and unnecessary.
No other language, even Fortran or ADA does much of this, and what it
does is usually not very good.

The true argument for including such stuff is NOT requirements of
algebraic  manipulation stuff, but the prospect of doing
ARITHMETIC manipulation stuff with C.L.  Since only a few people are
familiar with Macsyma and Macsyma-like systems, requirements expressed
in the form "macsyma needs it"  seem unarguable.  But they are not...