[Chicken-users] R6RS Rant

[Kon Lovett]

On Jun 4, 2007, at 11:49 PM, felix winkelmann wrote:

> On 6/4/07, Mitchell Wand <address@hidden> wrote:
> > We are sorry to report that Will Clinger has resigned from the  
> > Editors
> > Committee, effective on May 21, 2007.  We accept his resignation  
> > with regret
> > and thank him for his service.
> >
> > According the Charter, the Steering Committee has three months to  
> > replace a
> > resigning editor.  The Steering Committee has therefore decided to  
> > wait
> > until after the ratification ballot before taking steps to replace  
> > him.
>
> There goes another one...

R6RS has become a debacle.

Dropping consensus was a terrible idea. While it "dooms" Standard  
Scheme to a "toy language wasteland" it had the benefit of a stable,  
reliable, platform for extension.

Taking SRFIs in popular use verbatim as the standard (ex: the  
inclusion of the KMP algorithm in SRFI-13) may not be the catholic  
response, but using close to 98% of the popular SRFIs gives us proven  
APIs.

If I may be so bold, it seems the greatest issue is the "library"  
arena. Drop it. Define a core only. There is so many similar  
extensions of R5RS in std use that an agreeable R6RS would not be a  
rewrite of R5RS. (BTW, I think the full numeric tower & extended  
characters/strings should be core. Doesn't mean a compiler can't be  
told to not use them.)

I suspect there is a core in R6RS on which consensus can be reached.  
For example, why can't we just agree on a record concept sufficient  
to represent conditions. The issue of composite vs multiple  
inheritance shouldn't be a deal breaker. How an implementation  
provides record type composition shouldn't be a problem, so long as  
it does.

And the holes. Hell, everyone deals with filenames, but R6RS has no  
API. Record inheritance but no pathname concept.

Yeah, I would love algebraic type extension, multi-valued  
continuations (I use Feely's extension in F-operator for this but I  
don't think I should need to), delimited-continuations, reader/ 
printer extension, defined syntax vs. semantic phases, syntax  
extension, namespaces, packaging, ...) but we ain't gonna agree on it  
(or not most of it anyway).

Rant, rant, ...,
Kon

> cheers,
> felix
>
>
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