Question of the Referees:
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Could we have more precisions on masses, semileptonic decays and lifetimes, as compared with other experiments, such as Selex, B-factories, etc.?
For instance, up to what point you would say that an improvement of 10 in statistics would translate into qualitatively new knowledge?
Could you please point out more precisely which discoveries are
foreseeable, which will not be done before and/or better elsewhere?
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With the start-up of new experiments like E781 [5] and E831 [6] at FNAL, the continuation of CLEO [7] and BES and the arrival of Hera-B, BaBar and Belle at the turn of the century the field of charmed hadrons has become very competitive. In the following we will therefore try to evaluate the strengths of the newly proposed COMPASS experiment as compared to the other projects. This comparison is very difficult in those cases, where charm physics only represents a side product and no numbers are given in the proposals of the relevant competitors.