Full name : Sam Tobin-Hochstadt Affiliation : Northeastern University Vote: No.
Rationale: 1. The new standard is gratuitously incompatible with the current standard for Scheme. It is the job of standards committees to produce compatibility and interoperability, instead this committee chose the opposite route. For example, despite isomorphic features, the module system is incompatible with the current standard. 2. The module system is pointlessly inflexible, and requires additional boilerplate beyond that in R6RS and other existing implementation-specific module systems. Rather than lifting the restrictions present in other systems, it adds more, necessitating terrible additions such as include. 3. The draft leaves the semantics of the top level fundamentally unspecified. If this aspect of the charter cannot be portably accomplished, it should not be standardized. Simply describing a feature without saying what it should do is not standardization. Most significantly, the draft makes a concerted effort to avoid hard decisions that might alienate any of the community [1]. As a result, it is less of a standard than a description of the current balkanized state of the Scheme community. If real standardization of Scheme is impossible, then we should avoid trying, just as we do not put effort into a single standard describing both Scheme and Common Lisp. [1] With the notable exception of the majority of the community that favored R6RS. _______________________________________________ Scheme-reports mailing list [email protected] http://lists.scheme-reports.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/scheme-reports
