Kun Liang scripsit: > Following is my viewpoint. Small language should define all the > "core" syntax and primitives. These will keep stable for a long period > of time. Large language is just a small language with a much bigger > set of standard libraries.
I personally agree with you, but as chair of WG2, I must say that until WG2 has done its work it would be premature to say that. > In this sense, I think that we do not need to seperate the > functions or values (in draft 6) into several libraries. If they > were essential, we can just put them into a single library like > (scheme lang) or (scheme base), and import this library in every > scheme program by default. Any thing that not essential (purely for > compatibility with r5rs) should be place into a seperate library like > (scheme r5rs), will be removed in future. First of all, the base library is not about what is essential. `Length` and `map` are not essential; indeed, they can be expressed clearly enough in Scheme, and usually are. The base library contains the procedures and syntax that a Scheme programmer would expect to find available, plus some that are called into existence by symmetry, such as `vector-map` and `string-map`. Second, the distinction you are making is insufficiently flexible. For example, non-real numbers are optional in both R5RS and R7RS. If you don't have complex numbers, there is no point in having make-complex and magnitude and phase, and R5RS says so in the text of the document. In R7RS, this notion of optionality is made explicit by putting the complex-number procedures into a module that implementations without complex numbers need not provide. In other cases, a very small Scheme may not wish to provide read or write/display at run time, because there is no need for I/O of general Scheme objects, and so putthing them in a module makes sense. -- First known example of political correctness: John Cowan After Nurhachi had united all the other http://www.ccil.org/~cowan Jurchen tribes under the leadership of the [email protected] Manchus, his successor Abahai (1592-1643) issued an order that the name Jurchen should --S. Robert Ramsey, be banned, and from then on, they were all The Languages of China to be called Manchus. _______________________________________________ Scheme-reports mailing list [email protected] http://lists.scheme-reports.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/scheme-reports
