On 11/12/13 00:08, Giorgio Flaverli wrote: [Ignoring the inflammatory stuff, I just want to clarify one point here...]
> Another problem: anything other than a small standard makes it hard to > write Scheme interpreters "for everything". This was the amazing thing > about Scheme. Want to drive your embedded system? Go ahead and embed a > tiny scheme interpreter. Want to drive JVM code? Use KAWA or Sisc. Want > to drive an Ocaml program? Embed OCS. R7RS-small might be good, but when > lots people write R7RS-large code, and some write R6RS, a lot of code > will be useless to minimalistic implementations. > > Finally, it's sad that this whole disaster was fostered upon the > community un-necessarily. There was absolutely nothing wrong with > extending Scheme via the SRFI process, particularly on the library side. That's what R7RS-large is, pretty much; identifying things we lack SRFIs for and making them... R7RS-small is your minimal Scheme core that can fit into tiny spaces, while still having the expressive power to run portable reference implementations of SRFIs from R7RS-large. Of course, some SRFIs are interfaces to platform-specific features such as networking, that can't have a portable reference implementation, in which case they still help people on embedded systems by providing a standard interface (with reference code for the portable parts) to whatever hardware features the platform provides. R7RS-large will be a grab-bag of useful optional tools that can be added to an R7RS-small implementation - by the user, if it can be done in a portable library, or by the implementer, if an optimised implementation using implementation-specific features is desirable or access to platform-specific features is required. So I think the fears above about the future direction of Scheme are unfounded, and would like to make sure everyone is aware of that :-) ABS -- Alaric Snell-Pym http://www.snell-pym.org.uk/alaric/
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