Proceedings of the 2010 international conference on Lisp

Welcome to Nevada and to the 2010 International Lisp Conference! This week's conference, the sixth of its kind during the past decade, continues our special tradition of communicating research results and practical lore related to Lisp. On behalf of the entire Conference Committee, the Program Committee, and the ALU Board of directors let me extend a special Thanks to you people for your support and participation in this ground-breaking event. The locale--Sparks, Nevada--is located on the Eastern edge of the Sierra mountains and the Western edge of the high desert, and I hope you will be able to take advantage of the natural beauty around us, of our friendly Lispers supporting the ILC, and the variegated software researchers and practitioners from around the world who are attending our sister conferences: SPLASH, DLS, and PLoP. This year's program features a fine group of invited speakers, several tutorials, and eight research papers and demonstrations. Our invited speakers are Lawrence Hunter, Jans Aasman, Marc Feeley, Peter Seibel, Lowell Hawkinson. Additionally, Don Syme has been jointly invited by both ILC and SPLASH; his talk will be a SPLASH Keynote. Noteworthy about this year is a large set of firsts for both the ILC and the ALU. This is the first time that the ILC has ever been colocated with any other event, although we worked out arrangements to try it with OOPSLA in 2005, yet finally chosing the Stanford venue which we had already been working on. After 2005, we had determined to target our proceedings toward the ACM Digital Library as the best way to make our works consistently available to the scientific community, reliably for the indefinite future. In colocating with SPLASH (the streamlined, new OOPSLA) this year, we achieve a masterstroke in relieving so much of the organisational burden in giving birth to a huge meeting like this. And we achieve a significant reduction in local site and operational management costs, especially with the leverage of ACM expertise in running successful conferences for decades, and their power of negotiation with conference service providers. Colocating with the major SIGPLAN programming languages Conferences (OOPSLA and a halfdozen or so of other, smaller ones) gives us a chance for Lispers to take in a bit of the other world, for some of them to browse by ours, and to renew our affinity with this larger community in general. It is also the first time we have shared another conference an invitation to give an invited talk (Don Syme as mentioned above.) This is the first time that the ILC has ever been scheduled during a major economic recession (some would say "depression") Time and time again I have heard from members of our ILC community this year that the will be unable to afford travel, or cannot get their employer's consent, and so on. However, by the leverage we get from ACM's local arrangements efficiency, we were able to contain costs in such a way that that the Early Registration fee for members is almost half of what it was at Stanford in 2005 and Cambridge, UK in 2007. Also we've been offered a 3.5 star hotel at a price that is between half and one third of what we had to pay in 2009 in Cambridge, MA. Finally we trimmed down the program from 4 days to 3, and did a double-tracking of Lisp tutorials against the SPLASH Keynote talks (to which all colocatees are invited) We hope you find at least one of these subtracks interesting, and might expect to see some BOFs occurring during the same timeslots. Despite all these firsts, we continue in the traditions set in past ILCs, such as following the highest professional standards of Program Committee activity (and following all ACM/SIGPLAN guidelines, beginning in 2005), soliciting and receiving presentation proposals form a wide spectrum of scientific endeavours: Lisp and lisp-like language analysis and design, numeric computing,bioinformatics, intelligent databases, compilers, ANS standards, Artificial Intelligence, commercial productising leveraging Lisp, and many others. Especially with the F# talk by Don Syme, we make another first; by trying to understand the parallels between language design for Lisp and that for a new generation of typical "conventional" languages, we benefit from a mutual interest in sharing with one another. Finally, the last first is the hardest to explain. This year we labored under the shortest ever start-to-finish time for organising any such kind of Conference: barely three and a half months. There were several impediments including a somewhat late decision by SIGPLAN to invite us to colocate in 2010, followed by several months of indecision within the ALU itself, followed by changes in the ACM and SIGPLAN organisations which caused a fresh look at all the procedures required to apply for the kind of colocaton we wanted to do. In all, we were unable to form an approved Conference committee and get out a Call for Papers until the first week of June. The deadline for submission had to be set at only 6 weeks prior to the Conference start (and the final papers due date a bit less than two weeks before!) We owe such incredible gratitude to the Program Committee and its chair, Antonio Leito, for herculean effort beyond the call of duty. And there were a number of little "bluebirds" of fortunate accident that came to us nearly every week, saving the Conference from certain disaster.