This department is devoted to Intemational Lisp Efforts. All the relative news will be collected by the editor who will attempt to make them fit together. It is always difficult to start such a department from scratch since it can only survives if all news converge to the editor and none did so yet! Where you to hear or read interesting news, get the reflex. Send it to the Community!

You can reach me at the following net addresses

USENET: ..!mcvax!inria!queinnec
ARPA: mcvax!inria!queinnec@seisnto.css.GOV

or you can use postal address

Pr. Christian QUEINNEC
Laboratoire d'Informatique Théorique et de Programmation
Université Pierre et Marie Curie PARIS VI
4, Place Jussieu
F-75252 PARIS Cedex France

I plan to sum up ISO progress in these columns and thereafter is a short history of the birth of Lisp standardization. But tell me what kind of other news you expect from this department? Remember that Lisp Pointers is to be distributed all around the World and presumably also to people far away from ARPA/USEnet. So send all worth printing informations relative to international announcements, ` standardization points of view, meetings summary ...


ISO Efforts
Intemational efforts towards Lisp standardization are on the way in various countries. Japan, US and, in Europe, United Kingdom, Germany and France are working onto proposals that soon will be discussed in ISO. But let us present the environment.

Environment
ISO is the International Organization for Standardization. That huge body is compound of Technical Committees. Among them is the ISO/TC97 on Information Processing Systems. That broad area is also divided into SubCommittees. ISO/TC97/SC22 is devoted to Languages (in fact all kinds of Information Processing Languages). Many countries belong to TC97. There are two sorts of members in that democracy: P- and O- members. Roughly, P-members participate, debate and vote while Q-members only observe.These countries are, for TC97:

P-members	P-members	Q-members	P-members
Austria	Belgium	Australia	Brazil
Canada	China	Bulgaria	Chile
Czechoslavakia	Denmark	Colombia	Cuba
Danmark	Finland	Greece	India
France	Germany	FR Ireland	Israel
Hungary	Iran	Korea	Rep. of Pakistan
Iraq	Italy	Portugal	Romania
Japan	The Netherlands	Saudi Arabia	South Africa
Norway	Poland	Spain	Thailand
Sweden	Switzerland	Trinidad and Tobago	Turkey
United Kingdom	United States	Venezuela	Yugoslavia
USSR	.	.	.