On Sun, Oct 11, 2020 at 7:38 AM Lassi Kortela <[email protected]> wrote:


> If the community discovers after the fact that an existing SRFI's scope
> is too broad, it seems it would be best to make a new SRFI (with a new
> SRFI number) that is simply a subset of the old SRFI. This has been done
> in the past: all the SRFIs with "reduced" in their title.


All four out of over 200, none of which represent splits.  13 -> 152
(strings) and 114 -> 128 (comparators) represent genuine simplifications,
though some procedures from 114 were added back by 162.  99 -> 131
(R6RS-ish records) represents a reduction to those features of 99 that can
be portably implemented, and 150 is a different approach to 131.

Scheme
> implementations that ship the old SRFI could also ship the new one, with
> the identifiers simply being aliases to the old library.
>

Quite so.  But that's not the story here: there are no similar facilities
for lexical syntax.  I think it would be a WOMBAT (waste of money, brains,
and time) to split 4/160 (heterogenous vectors) or 135 (texts).  It's true
that 163 (array literals) and 164 (arrays) are split, but we are explicitly
told that 163 can be used with any array SRFI, though in fact the only
implementation of either 163 or 164 is Kawa.



John Cowan          http://vrici.lojban.org/~cowan        [email protected]
In the sciences, we are now uniquely privileged to sit side by side
with the giants on whose shoulders we stand.  --Gerald Holton

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