Significant contributions to this specification came from Jeffrey Schlimmer, who contributed the first draft of the simple type specification, and to Chris Sells, who applied his editorial and PM skills to turn the initial Word document into dead trees. Thanks also go to Karen Gettman at Pearson/AW for her seemingly endless patience, and to Stephan Danton for his mastery over pixels and bits.

The following individuals provided extensive comments that improved the readability (and accuracy) of this document: Michael Coulson, John Doty, John Hamby, Kris Horrocks, Leslie Lamport, Chris Sells, Don Spencer, Ralph Squillace, Janie Storkel, Clemens Szyperski, Michael Weinhardt, Bruce Williams, Scott Wiltamuth, and Matt Winkler. Thanks also go to the entire team that produces the M language framework, compiler, and runtime for backing this specification up with the always important running code.

Finally, M grew out of a community of users and developers and has been significantly influenced and improved based on their experiences and feedback. The most vocal of that community were Sonu Arora, Mohsen Agsen, Lonny Bastien, Gavin Bierman, Anthony Bloesch, Jonas Boli, Jim Carley, Yann Christensen, Steve Cook, Christopher Garg, Nikhil George, Chris Gillum, Andy Gordon, Destry Hood, Sid Jayadevan, Jim Johnson, John Justice, Geoffrey Kizer, Wojtek Kozaczynski, Kevin Lam, John Lambert, Steve Maine, Will Manis, Laurent Mollicone, Tapas Nayak, David Noble, Savas Parastatidis, Ram Raghavendra Rao, Daniel Roth, Igor Sedukhin, Joe Sharp, Prasad Sripathi Panditharadhya, Clemens Vasters, Omar Venado Estrada, Florian Voss, Tony Williams, and Eric Zinda.