adding to kernel

[George J. Carrette <GJC at MIT-MC>]

    From: Fahlman at CMU-20C
    It is hard to comment on whether NIL is closer to being released than
    other Common Lisp implementations, since you don't give us a time
    estimate for NIL.

Oh. I had announced a release date of JAN 30. But, with the air-conditioner's
down for greater than a week that's got to go to at lease FEB 10. But
FEB 10 is the first week of classes at MIT, so I'll have JM, GJS, and
others on my case to get other stuff working. Sigh.
By release I mean that it is in a useful state, i.e. people will be able
to run their lisp programs in it. We have two concrete tests though,
[1] To bring up "LSB".
   [A] This gives us stuff like a full hair FORMAT.
   [B] Martin's parser.
[2] TO run Macsyma on the BEGIN, SIN, MATRIX, ALGSYS, DEFINT, ODE2 and
    HAYAT demos.

Imagine bringing yourself and a tape to a naked VMS site, and installing
Emacs, a modern lisp, and Macsyma, in that order. You can really
blow away the people who have heard about these things but never
had a chance to use them, especially on their very own machine.
One feeling that makes the hacking worthwhile.

Anyway, when I brought Macsyma over to the Plasma Fusion
Center Alcator Vax, I was doing all the taylor series, integrals and
equation solving they threw at me. Stuff like
INTEGRATE(SIN(X^2)*EXP(X^2)*X^2,X); Then DIFF it, then RATSIMP and TRIGREDUCE
to get back to the starting point.(try that on MC and see how many
files get loaded). (Sorry, gibberish to non-macsyma-hackers.)
=> So I can say that macsyma is released to MIT sites now. (MIT-LNS too).
   People can use it and I'll field any bug reports. <=

Point of Confusion: Some people are confused as to what Common-Lisp is.
                    Even people at DEC.

-GJC