| Date: Mon, 13 Aug 2007 23:04:16 -0400 | From: John Cowan <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> | | Aubrey Jaffer scripsit: | | > I have 70,000 lines of mathematical, scientific, engineering, | > database, and scripting software written in (R4RS) Scheme showing | > that this small number of rules is "flexible enough to support | > most of the major programming paradigms in use today." | | Lapack, which is just a small part of Netlib, is more than ten | times as large as SLIB, demonstrating even more conclusively that | an even smaller number of Fortran 66 constructs suffice.
Are most major programming paradigms supported by Lapack? Where are the object-oriented libraries? Database programming? Functional programming? SAX? DOM? | > The significance of this achievement by R4RS is not widely | > appreciated. Procedure are sufficient to create nearly any new | > features. Even new control features do not require new syntax. | | No syntax other than (DEFINE foo ...), LAMBDA, SET!, IF, and QUOTE | is actually *required* at all. Why not confine yourself to those? I agree with R4RS' claims that its rules are "flexible enough to support most of the major programming paradigms in use today." If you want to assert that about some smaller set of rules, that's your right. | > The effect of adding macros to Scheme has been the proliferation of | > mutually incomprehensible language dialects. | | The effect of underspecifying Scheme has been the proliferation of | mutually *incompatible* language dialects. This is just as true of | RRRS, R3RS, and R5RS as of R4RS. SLIB provides a uniform presentation (other than numerics) on all the R4RS-compliant implementations. With SLIB, it is not difficult to use these Scheme dialects in a compatible fashion. | In addition, it is no accident that every Scheme implementation | beginning with Steele's has provided macros. User-defined new language constructs are not necessarily the motivation for implementing macros. Macros can be useful internally to an implementation and for implementing session debugging tools like TRACE and BREAK. _______________________________________________ r6rs-discuss mailing list [email protected] http://lists.r6rs.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/r6rs-discuss
