By the way, I should comment further that I see Marc's Snow project as a win-win proposition. I don't think it needs to be in a zero-sum competition with R6RS. Snow is a (relatively rich) least common denominator that works across a fairly broad range of Scheme systems -- including those that will run R6RS.
All Snow libraries will be widely portable, and R6RS libraries will portable across a more limited (but important) set of implementations. Well, great! This is still a very good place to be relative to the historical status quo. -Ryan On Oct 27, 2007, at 12:57 PM, Ryan Newton wrote: > >> 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. > > This mechanism has failed. If it were an outstanding success then > that would make for a different story. But given the failure thus- > far, I think the argument for the standard being useless becomes an > argument for despair -- i.e. Scheme is dead, has failed, etc. > > I personally would rather call this a success. Running my code on > PLT, Larceny, and Chez is much better than what I have now. In > particular, that at least gives you access to PLT when you need > libraries or debugging, and Larceny or Chez when you need performance. > > I sympathize with Jeffrey Siskind's argument that many Scheme > implementations should be experimental playgrounds. But in my > opinion, these implementations should be tailored for individual > applications, used by a small number of people, and shouldn't be > affected one way or another by a standard being ratified. > > -Ryan > _______________________________________________ r6rs-discuss mailing list [email protected] http://lists.r6rs.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/r6rs-discuss
