Was Terry Pratchett inspired by Hal Clement?

The science fiction author Hal Clement wrote several stories set in planets with interesting features, perhaps most famously Mesklin, a planet with a flattened shape and a very strong gravitational force.

More recently, the fantasy author Terry Pratchett wrote several stories set in the famous Discworld, as well as a precursor sci-fi novel Strata featuring another flat world. His Bromeliad trilogy also features a main character called Masklin – a very similar world to Hal Clement’s "Mesklin".

Was Terry Pratchett a fan of Hal Clement, with the name Masklin being a homage to him and his own flat worlds inspired by Clement’s planetbuilding stories?

I’m not the only person to have guessed at such a connection, for what it’s worth:

Incidentally, I would love to think that Terry Pratchett was glancingly recalling the Mesklinites in his childrens’ SF triloy – Truckers, Diggers and Wings – featuring a colony of alien ‘nomes’ stranded on Earth. Though humanoid these likeable beings are very small, surely indicating a high-gravity origin, and are eventually led to safety by a hero called Masklin. This fragment of literary intertextuality, if that’s the correct jargon, is probably not worth an entire thesis.

— David Langford, Starcombing