changeLog.txt

We appreciate the many suggestions for improvement to the paper we
received from the reviewers: With the help of Brent Hailpern we have
tried to do them justice by making extensive revisions.

While we did make a todo list of all the individual suggestions to the
reviewers and ultimately (hopefully) ended up addressing the vast
majority of them, listing for each one what we did exactly would be
tedious and (we feel) pointless: The paper is overall quite different
from the original submission - in particular, it is significantly longer.

Here are some of the major improvements:

- We added a timeline of the Emacs evolution to the paper with
  references/links to the specific sections explaining the changes.

- We expanded the explanation of many Lisp constructs.

- We conducted a phone interview with Joseph Arceneaux (first
  maintainer of Emacs 19) about the Lucid Eamcs schism and reflected
  the results in the paper.

- Several people (notably Richard Stallman, Richard Gabriel, Richard
  Mlynarik and Jamie Zawinski) answered questions about specific
  aspects of the history and rationales by e-mail, whose answers are
  reflected in the paper.

- We tracked down many additional sources, and added the appropriate
  citations.

- We added more information about the motivation between the
  various changes.

- We tracked down authorship for many aspects of Emacs Lisp that
  weren't part of the original submissions.

- We rewrote the conclusion to adequately summarize the trajectory the
  material takes now.

- In the end, we ended up not significantly restructuring the paper.
  The notable change we made was relegating the section on alternative
  implementations to the appendix.

The main comments we failed to address completely are:

- Discussion about how Elisp dealt with "breaking backward compatibility":
  we added various relevant details throughout the paper, but we have not
  "structur[ed the paper] around these issues".  It was not clear to us what
  that would entail nor that the result would be better overall.

- Reordering of section 4: rather than follow the reviewer's suggested
  order, we decided to start with the core language features, in the same
  order as in the MacLisp section immediately prior.

- Rather than "playing up" the "unbridgeable personal differences", we removed
  this from the conclusion, since in retrospect fairly few such differences
  had a significant impact on the Elisp language.  But we did go into more
  details for the few cases where that happened.

- We kept the "table of contents section" at the end of the intro, because
  while we don't very much like it either it seems to benefit those who like
  them more than it harms the ones who don't.
  If the reviewers all agree it should go, we'll be happy to remove it.

- We have not really provided a high-level summary of the highlights of the
  evolution.  We're still struggling to decide what should be in it.  But we
  rewrote the conclusion in a way that might reduce the desire for such
  a summary.

We hope the revision meets your approval, and would be honored to be
included in HOPL IV.