Maybe - *maybe* - the focus on voting procedures and such (e.g., when a super-majority is called for) is premature and not worth it.
The temptation to focus on that is understandable: It's commonly believed that the primary goal here is to produce an artifact: a language standard. The content of that standard is widely understood to be contentious. Therefore people tend to focus on the rules that govern that content. Perhaps that's all just crazy and perhaps this is a better alternative - a better way to look at it: The early Reports had the form of a formal language specification but that is only half the story of what they really were. The Lambda the Ultimate papers and the Rabbit thesis were the essential context of those early reports. Essentially, a discovery was being reported: that a language of the Scheme sort was extremely parsimonious in a lot of initially surprising ways. You could have this tiny core and a few concepts and from that you could then construct (in pragmatic ways) many different programming concepts. The same tiny core afforded what was then a surprisingly simple yet impressively optimizing compiler. The same tiny core afforded a variety of surprisingly simple yet effective implementation techniques for interpreters. The early reports were, in this reading of them, kind of a footnote that explained with some precision what was meant by the "core". The early canon of Scheme was in that sense that whole suite of papers plus the thesis. So... by analogy: *maybe* a good direction for the process to go is to formally facilitate the development and publication of "propositions" for R7, along with the development and publication of - for want of a better phrase - "environmental impact reports" about how each proposition looks to various parts of the community. That is: initially formalize a deliberative process rather than a standardization process. If people participate in the deliberative process we'll collectively get a better idea of "where we are". With that new perspective, the political process problem for governing the content of R7 might be an easier problem to understand and deal with. Perhaps something like the SRFI process, but about language design. -t _______________________________________________ r6rs-discuss mailing list [email protected] http://lists.r6rs.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/r6rs-discuss
