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\F1\COct 2, 1978







Carl Helmers, Editor-in-Chief
Byte Publications
70 Main St.
Peterborough NH, 03458


Dear Carl:

\JGot your letter; sounds good. I will be glad to produce a \F5LISP vs Pascal\F1
article for  the Feb. BYTE.  The August (august?) LISP issue is  also exciting.
How  does the following proposal sound: a series of articles on LISP --the language
and its implementation-- during the year, with the August issue being contributed
papers on various aspects of LISP --applications, theory, machines, and future
directions. I can supply the series and (hopefully)
I can organize and prod the LISPers to produce the articles. 
I say "hopefully" since organizing LISP people is like organizing cats!
I will get a lot of practice in prodding since I am also trying to organize
a LISP conference for 1980.

Here are some topics  which might be august articles and personages who might
be brow-beatable:

Mathematical logic and LISP; LISP vs. APL; applications of LISP by a 
"theoretician": Vaughan Pratt, MIT

I already asked Vaughan if he would be interested and available; answer is
"yes" and topics were his suggestion. Topics below are my tentative  matchings.
As yet I have not contacted any of these individuals, this is only a "wish list".

LISP implementations for micros and minis: Pat Greussay, University of Paris.

LISP architecture: Richard Greenblatt, MIT; Nori Abe, Osaka Univ (micro-coded LISP)

Killing the "LISP must be inefficient" myth; e.g. compiling, data representations,
 and arithmetic in a production LISP: Guy Steele, MIT

How LISP can be used to motivate a mathematics program: Mike Burke, San Jose State

Traditional LISP applications: all kinds of bodies at SRI and Stanford

Interactive Development systems in LISP: Warren Teitleman, XEROX PARC

Applications of LISP to program correctness: John McCarthy, Stanford; Bob Boyer, SRI; Corky Cartwright, Cornell.

Languages for AI: Ed Feigenbaum's group, Stanford.

LISP future: Carl Hewitt, Guy Steele, Jerry Sussman, MIT

Let me know what you think about the proposal; if the answer is yes I'll start
coercing people, and writing articles. In the meantime I'll hack the \F5Forum\F1
article.
\.
\←L\→S\←R\-L\/'2;\+L\→L

Yours sincerely,



John R. Allen
18215 Bayview Dr.
Los Gatos Ca. 95030
408 353-2227
\←S\→L