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\F1\CJan 20, 1979

Peter Zilahy Ingerman, Editor-in-Chief
Computing Reviews
Association for Computing Machinery
1133 Avenue of the Americas
New York, NY 10036

Dear Sir:

\JThis is a difficult letter to write. It deals with the review of my
book \F5Anatomy of LISP\F1, review number 33,690, by W.D. Maurer.
Essentially, the review totally ignores the content of the book.
Nothing is said about its organization or its quality. Most of the review
consists of quotes from the book.  All of the  comments are made about
material within the first 25 pages of the book, leading one to surmise
that most of the 446 pages remain unread by Dr. Maurer.

His first sentence is wrong: \F5"...produced by a computer-aided typesetting
system
of much higher quality than we have seen in the past."\F1 In fact, the quality is
quite poor ... but that's another issue.
He complains of the "publication language"  as being confusing to BASIC
programmers; the relevance of that escapes me.

He complains that \F5" ...as is usual with books on LISP, a familarity
with mathematics is assumed from the very first page, ..."\F1.
First, I confess ignorance of  such books. 
 LISP books I know of are mostly programming manuals; 
that is most definitely \F2not\F1
the purpose of \F5Anatomy\F1.
Second,
I don't find it particularly damning to expect mathematical knowledge;
I would doubt that very effective use could be made  even of Fortran,
if the reader  had no mathematical knowledge.

In fact the whole attitude which pervades the review: that it's offensive
to request that the university computer science student know mathematics
and be able to think past BASIC, is offensive to me!  It is this attitude
which I hope \F5Anatomy\F1 will help eliminate. I realize  Dr. Maurer wrote
a book that teaches people to program in LISP if 
they know how to program in Fortran; but that is not the point of the book
nor indeed an endeavor which I would encourage.

I don't feel that the
review by Dr. Maurer does justice to the book. The people who know the book
have been  pleased with it;
Dr. Maurer's review will not affect
their judgement. However, the Computing Reviews is the official organ of the
ACM; as such, it can affect the judgements of those without other sources of
information. In the case of this review, that is unfortunate.

I am sending this letter and a copy of the review
to several colleagues.
  Perhaps  some of them will feel strongly enough
about this issue to  write another review.
\.
\←L\→S\←R\-L\/'2;\+L\→L

Yours sincerely,



John R. Allen
18215 Bayview Dr.
Los Gatos Ca, 95030
\←S\→L
CC: W. D. Maurer