Duncan Steele scripsit: > Cloud considerations are perhaps not the most pressing reasons to avoid > dialects in Scheme, but if the intention with R7RS-large is to build an > "engineering" Scheme (I'm not certain what the exact R7RS brief is, > but I certainly hope to use Scheme in future work), then I think it > needs to attain the consistency that python, ruby, php get from having > a reference implementation.
It's simply too late in the history of Scheme for that. Scheme has a tradition of loose specs and highly variable implementations. An attempt to christen an implementation as the "reference" and say that every other implementation must be compatible with its idiosyncratic way of doing things will not be accepted by the Scheme community. Even though R6RS is much more tightly specified than R7RS, there are still many incompatibilities between implementations, and nobody is arguing that they must or even should be removed. The only reason definition-by-implementation works with Ruby and Python is that for a long time there was only one implementation (Perl 5 is still like this), so other implementations were and still are playing catch-up. No Scheme implementation, not even the first, has ever held that privileged position. (I have sometimes referred to Chibi as a reference implementation, but only in the sense that it shows that R7RS-small *can* be implemented; there is absolutely no requirement for any other implementation to be bug-for-bug-compatible with it.) -- John Cowan [email protected] http://ccil.org/~cowan If I have not seen as far as others, it is because giants were standing on my shoulders. --Hal Abelson _______________________________________________ Scheme-reports mailing list [email protected] http://lists.scheme-reports.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/scheme-reports
