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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