Alan_Crowe comments on Hold Off On Proposing Solutions - Less Wrong

45 Post author: Eliezer_Yudkowsky 17 October 2007 03:16AM

You are viewing a comment permalink. View the original post to see all comments and the full post content.

Comments (48)

Sort By: Old

You are viewing a single comment's thread.

Comment author: Alan_Crowe 17 October 2007 11:55:07AM 2 points [-]

X3J13, the ANSI committee that standarised Common Lisp, had many problems to solve. Kent Pitman credits Larry Masinter with imposing the disciple of seperating problem descriptions from proposed solutions and gives insights into what that meant in practise in a post to comp.lang.lisp

http://tinyurl.com/2hppgs

The general interest lies in that fact that the X3J13 Issues were all written up and are available on line.

http://www.lispworks.com/documentation/HyperSpec/Front/X3J13Iss.htm

or

http://www.lisp.org/HyperSpec/FrontMatter/X3J13-Issues.html

so if you wish to study how this works there is a resource you can analyse.

I should confess that my interest has been in content not process. I have been reading these issues to learn Common Lisp. Are these pages really a useful resource for scholars wishing to study the separation of problem descriptions from proposed solutions? I don't know.