RE: The death John McCarthy - LISP, HIP & GSE

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I am sure these are the kind of "discussions" people had in mind when they suggested that we should make better and more effective use of the e-mail lists for our work in IETF...

Regards,

Christer


________________________________________
From: ietf-bounces@xxxxxxxx [ietf-bounces@xxxxxxxx] On Behalf Of Dave Cridland [dave@xxxxxxxxxxxx]
Sent: Monday, October 31, 2011 7:10 PM
To: Robin Whittle
Cc: IETF-Discussion
Subject: Re: The death John McCarthy - LISP, HIP & GSE

On Sun Oct 30 09:45:43 2011, Robin Whittle wrote:
> The "both" was not meant to include you

But yet that's clearly what you said, suggesting that splitting hairs
over whether the definite article implies a singleton, despite
protestations from the authors to the contrary, is possibly not
approriate either.

Describing you as "Robin Whittle, the Australian engineer" would be
entirely accurate, yet would not imply you are the only engineer on
that continent - merely that if there were any confusion over which
Robin Whittle I might be referring to, that sobriquet might assist.

Similarly, referring to "LISP, the Locator/Identifier Separation
Protocol" seems reasonable, and disambiguates from other uses of
LISP, such as speech defects, programming languages, and so on. It
does not imply, to my eyes, that the speaker believes it to be the
one true protocol, any more than "lisp - the speech defect" implies
that nobody must consider any other speech defect.

On a final note - from me at least - if people genuinely do take
offence on behalf on a deceased computer scientist because some other
group of people chose to name their protocol similarly to said late
scientist's programming language, I am astonished. We seem to have
developed a global culture that leaps to a kind of offence-by-proxy
at the slightest thing, I realise, but really, I find it hard to
believe that people can be actually *offended* at the name of a
protocol. Perhaps, like Robin's confusion above, I am
misunderstanding what the term "offended" means.

Dave.
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