Ray Dillinger scripsit:

>   2) R6RS makes it impossible to usefully implement scheme on 
>      any machine whose native character set is not Unicode.
>      Unicode, in turn, requires either OS support or large tables, 
>      either of which makes Scheme unsuitable for embedded systems
>      and both of which are utterly irrelevant for code that is 
>      supposed to run on systems that, like most embedded systems, 
>      do not use text.

Since "large" is not quantified, I can't call this false, but I
believe it to be misleading.  Without the (rnrs unicode (6)) library,
no tables whatsoever are required.  The ICU tables that would be
required to implement R6RS as of the current version of Unicode (5.1),
namely casing + normalization + general properties (which also provides
additional information not required by the standard, such as a mapping
from non-European digits to their numeric values) are 213KB in total.
Though I am no expert in embedded systems, I don't believe that really
counts as "large" any more.

> From the perspective of the steering committee, I'd say the module 
> and library system needs a major overhaul in order to give scheme 
> programmers ways to specify programs that run with only subsets of 
> the standard libraries and to put functions into libraries that 
> properly belong there.  

I certainly agree with this part.

-- 
John Cowan    [email protected]    http://ccil.org/~cowan
        Sound change operates regularly to produce irregularities;
        analogy operates irregularly to produce regularities.
                --E.H. Sturtevant, ca. 1945, probably at Yale

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