(Let's see if I can still post.) Full name (required): Jussi Piitulainen
Location (optional): Helsinki, Finland Affiliation (optional): University of Helsinki, but I speak for myself Contact details (optional): - Statement of interest (required since I did not register for the previous events): I'm a user of Scheme since R3RS and consider Scheme my native programming language. I've always read the reports and been ready to switch implementations. My largest project is a suite of programs to compute distributional similarity lists, which I rewrote in Gambit-C (R5RS+FFI for Sqlite) from scratch a year ago (wish I had written it in Scheme in the first place). I did an SRFI once. And a tiny library that implements Python-style generators. Vote (required): yes Rationale (optional): It was frustrating how record types, exceptions, and libraries of any sort first failed to make it into a report between R4RS and R5RS and after, and when they did, the report was otherwise different and the community was divided about it. ERR5RS seemed interesting. The decision to start again from R5RS was promising. I read a couple of R7RS drafts and found that my comments were appreciated and considered to the extent that they made sense. I find draft 9 an acceptable successor to R5RS in style and content, and I believe it does what the working group set out to do. It's not perfect but my remaining concerns are minor. I appreciate that certain R6RS decisions were adopted. The steering committee also asked about Chibi and its tests. I browsed the tests. They seemed right to me. It's been many months since I used Chibi itself. It seemed good then but not completely in synch with the report at the time - the organization of the libraries kept changing. I don't have adequate experience with the library mechanism. I appreciate that a model interface for sequence procedures was worked out, but the attempt to "round out" things for all sequence types failed: a new sequence type was introduced without such procedures, all these procedure may not be equally appropriate for all sequence types - such rounding up was considered ages ago and rejected then -, and the absence of mixed-type procedures is now awkward. Scheme fails to express the underlying abstraction. The main harm of all these procedures is that they take up space in the report. I'm still not experiencing complete happiness about the handling of internal definitions other than (define ...). I, too, wish procedures retained their identity when they are passed around. I don't remember writing code that depends on this, but it would be in the spirit of Scheme. I'm looking forward to the specification and implementation of further libraries - major and minor - in the large working group and otherwise outside the small language. _______________________________________________ Scheme-reports mailing list Scheme-reports@scheme-reports.org http://lists.scheme-reports.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/scheme-reports
