Hi Kent, R. Kent Dybvig wrote: > While it would be great if every implementation were to adopt R6RS, that > was never a possibility given the small number that fully adopted R5RS.
Then why bother writing and ratifying R6RS? As I understood things, there were two goals for R6RS: * Fixing a number of minor issues and ill-defined things in R5RS * Increasing the cross-implementation portability of Scheme code Since the standard was such that very few implementors were going to bother with it, a fact which was known prior to Marc's post, and also prior to ratification (and apparently even prior to writing, if you are to be believed here, Kent), then it was known prior to ratification that the standard had already failed its most important goal! So why was the standard ratified, given that its failure was already known? A standard which is largely unimplemented is a useless standard, except insofar as it is a list of suggested features. However, the Scheme community already has and had a mechanism for making lists of suggested features. In fact, Tom Lord once suggested that R6RS should have been broken up and reborn as a number of SRFIs. The editors were, in my opinion, very unwise to ignore this. Regards, Jon Wilson _______________________________________________ r6rs-discuss mailing list [email protected] http://lists.r6rs.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/r6rs-discuss
