As always, thank you for the clarification. My 6 month old is teething and waking me every 40 minutes starting around 3am. I'm mostly recalling from hazy, caffeine fueled memory. I like your posts -- so informative.

I admit to knowing little about Haskell's history. I had assumed it was an outgrowth of ML -- itself having an interesting history intertwined with the LCF theorem-proving system. Thanks for the clarification.

>> it was a standard developed by a committee

> That's basically nonsense.

In my much-abridged comment, yes I understand it could sound that way. I was referring to the entire process but mainly the ANSI committee. I was also under the, apparently mistaken impression, that there was more than one Lisp involved.

  In April 1981, after a DARPA-sponsored meeting concerning the splintered Lisp community, Symbolics, the SPICE project, the NIL project, and the S-1 Lisp project joined together to define Common Lisp. Initially spearheaded by White and Gabriel, the driving force behind this grassroots effort was provided by Fahlman, Daniel Weinreb, David Moon, Steele, and Gabriel. Common Lisp was designed as a description of a family of languages. The primary influences on Common Lisp were Lisp Machine Lisp, MacLisp, NIL, S-1 Lisp, Spice Lisp, and Scheme. Common Lisp: The Language is a description of that design. Its semantics were intentionally underspecified in places where it was felt that a tight specification would overly constrain Common Lisp esearch and use.

Quite right.. it's all there in ye old Hyperspec. Thank you for pointing that out.

Cheers.