Online Lisp Meeting #12

[Michał "phoe" Herda]

Hello,

I hope you haven't forgotten about the Meetings. I sure haven't! Time to
organize yet another one, or even two - since I got two videos, one
right after the other. The announcement for the second meeting will come
tomorrow though; let's focus on the first one for now!

This time, we'll have Jan Moringen talking about a modern (and already
rather successful!) approach to parsing the holy scriptures of Common
Lisp - the language specification in its TeX source format.

> The most important specification documents for the Common Lisp
> programming language, namely the Common Lisp ANSI standard and the
> Common Lisp HyperSpec (CLHS), are both provided under restrictive
> licenses (and at a cost in case of ANSI).  This situation prevents the
> creation and distribution of derived works such as alternative
> presentations or corrected revisions.  This inability to produce
> derived works has lead to the creation of independent errata lists
> that cannot be "applied" to the specification.
>
> Despite these obstacles, a way forward, albeit one that involves lots
> of effort, has been known for some time: start from the TeX sources of
> the draft specification ("dpANS"), which are in the public domain, and
> create new specification documents.  Those documents can then improve
> on the hyperlinking and presentation of the CLHS as well as
> incorporate corrections.  The high effort associated with this
> approach comes from the fact that the tools that were used to create
> the CLHS are not publicly available.
>
> This presentation explains the situation outlined above in more detail
> and introduces our project to create the required tools and produce
> new specification documents from the dpANS TeX sources and X3J13
> cleanup issue files.  After mentioning some of the problems in the
> draft specification as well as the CLHS that we plan to address, we
> present our method for parsing and processing the sources.  After
> that, we show current and future applications of the parsing,
> transformation and generation process.  We conclude by sharing open
> problems as well as a call to action aimed at re-discovering the most
> recent versions of the X3J13 issue files which we, so far, did not
> manage to find anywhere.

A short Jitsi talk with everyone will happen just after the meeting.
Where and when exactly - I'll link it in a follow-up mail.

Date/time/location:

* Date: 17th December 2021
* Time: 12:00 CET - https://time.is/en/CET
* Talk: https://www.twitch.tv/TwitchPlaysCommonLisp

A mailing list has been created for the purpose of organizing and
promoting the online talks. Further announcements will be posted there.
See https://mailman.common-lisp.net/listinfo/online-lisp-meets

New videos welcome! If you have anything lispy that you would like to
talk about, please let me know.

Calendar invitations will follow in replies to this mail.

BR and see you,
Michał "phoe" Herda