THIS REPOSITORY REPRESENTS A WORK IN PROGRESS.  UNLESS YOU KNOW WHAT
YOU ARE DOING, WE RECOMMEND THAT YOU MAKE NO ATTEMPT TO CLONE THIS
REPOSITORY AND CERTAINLY NO ATTEMPT TO BUILD THE FINAL DOCUMENT.

Ultimately, this repository is meant to contain a specification of an
improvement of the Common Lisp standard.  The new language is called
"Well Specified Common Lisp".  It will be abbreviated WSCL, and it
should be pronounced like "whistle".

The objective of this work is that a conforming implementation of WSCL
is also a conforming implementation of the Common Lisp standard.
Furthermore, most of the improvements will be such that a modern
conforming implementation of Common Lisp will already be a conforming
implementation of WSCL, or will require relatively few modifications
in order to become one.

This objective may sound too modest to be of any importance, but in
fact that is not the case.  The fact is that the Common Lisp standard
allows considerable freedom for conforming implementations.  Often,
this freedom takes the form of some behavior being unspecified or
undefined.  There might be several reasons for the Common Lisp
standard to allow this freedom.  One reason was no doubt for backward
compatibility with existing Lisp implementations.  Another was
probably uncertainty as to whether a more strict specification might
harm performance.

Since the Common Lisp standard was created, there have been
significant improvements in language implementation resulting from
research in this domain, and also significant improvements in the
capability of processors.  Furthermore, since the creation of the
standard, many high-quality Common Lisp implementations have been
created, and those implementations are now the norm, so that
considerations of backward compatibility should be discussed relative
to those implementations rather then Lisp systems that preceded them.

For this work, we aim to proceed as follows:

* We start with the dpANS document of the draft specification of the
  Common Lisp language.  This document is written in plain TeX, and is
  designed so that each chapter can be compiled separately.

* We convert this document to a single LaTeX document, using
  semi-automatic and manual techniques.  We make sure that semantic
  markup is preserved or improved.  We isolate macros for typographic
  markup from macros for semantic markup.  And we create new
  categories of LaTeX markup that will simplify the ultimate parsing
  of the final LaTeX sources into other formats such as HTML.

* We may eliminate some typographical markup that interferes with
  semantic markup, especially when the aesthetic value of the
  typographical markup is dubious.

* We create a Unix Makefile that creates a PDF file of the complete
  document. 

When all this work is done, we can proceed with the improvements.

* For each modified paragraph, we move the original paragraph to a
  so-called "end note", for which there is an available LaTeX
  package.  This way, it becomes easy to see that a paragraph differs
  from the original and it becomes easy to consult the original
  paragraph.  If only a small subset of the sentences in a paragraph
  have been modified, the note may contain only the modified
  sentences.

* New paragraphs are marked as such so that it is visually obvious
  that such a paragraph does not exist in the original Common Lisp
  standard.

Even though using LaTeX is definitely not ideal for creating a new
standard, we decided to use it nevertheless, rather than any of a
dozen or so alternatives for the following reasons:

* It has all the functionality we need, including software for
  correctly formatting bibliography references.

* Since the dpANS is written in TeX, most of the text can be included
  without modification, at least in an initial version.