On Feb 25, 2007, at 11:50 PM, Will Clinger wrote:
If we accept that the criterion for rejecting a program
should be the same in all implementations, then the
criteria should be decidable. In my opinion, criteria
that are supposed to be the same in all implementations
should also be simple; otherwise it is hard to reason
about the criteria, which seems like the main benefit
we could hope to achieve by requiring the criteria to
be the same. (I am discounting portability somewhat,
because absolute portability is a lost cause in the
presence of low-level macros.)
Ah, your true face is coming through.
From what I can tell, you want a language report for compiler
writers. Put differently, you want a rough outline of a language,
with lots of freedom to implement whatever is easy or interesting,
depending on the inclinations of the compiler writer. (Okay, perhaps
"rough" is unfair, but my English is poor.)
If I were a consumer/user/Scheme programmer, I'd hate that. I would
want to make sure that
1. The specification of the semantics is the same for as much as
possible so that I can port programs. Ideally it should be simple, too.
2. The specification of the static semantics is decidable and
decipherable on a couple of pages (at most). That's why it's Scheme,
not ML. That way I am not surprised when I take a program from one
implementation to another. See the post on ((lambda () ...) (k 22)).
Indeed, if 2 held, we could post a front-end at schemers.org and
check our programs just to make sure.
3. And I would then develop where it's easy to develop and run where
it's fast, with two or three or four eyes on those cases where the
Reporters say that implementations may implement different behaviors.
Seems like Scheme programmers -- as opposed to compiler writers --
are about to get neglected one more time. Oh well. -- Matthias
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