Hey Leppie,
On 23-Feb-2009 leppie wrote:
> From: "Aaron W. Hsu"
>> Chez's next version will support R6RS, and it's mostly finished. I
>> believe a Beta is supposed to be out pretty soon. In fact, Chez may
>> have better R6RS support very soon than most of the other systems
>> which did not start with R6RS.
>
> Yeah, I have been waiting quite some time for that, but as Chez
> almost supported the entire R6RS (but with different namings), why is
> it taking so long?
I can't speak for Chez's developer, but if I had to guess, there are a
few things I would think. For one, Chez Scheme has a few things that are
important to it that makes things take longer: it cares about supporting
the existing installations and software written for it (backwards
compatibility); it stakes its reputation on speed and reliability; it
focuses on *correctly* implementing standards.
If we consider this, then a few things would seem obvious guesses as to
why it takes so long:
1) People get busy, especially Professors.
2) Supporting R6RS in a way that remains faithfully backwards
compatible as much as possible is hard.
3) Many of the constructs in R6RS had not been implemented
before and there was not a known good, fast solution to how
to handle them.
4) Reliability means behaving correctly and reporting decent
errors and catching as many errors as soon as possible in the
code; this isn't easy to do, especially when implementing a
whole different language in a backwards compatible manner.
5) I don't think the author of Chez is going to be happy if his
system does not conform to R6RS as correctly as he can make
it conform, and he releases a version that is supposed to
be R6RS compliant. My guess is that he would wait a bit
longer to release and instead make sure that he fixed not
places where it failed to be conformant.
--
Aaron W. Hsu <[email protected]> | <http://www.sacrideo.us>
"Government is the great fiction, through which everybody endeavors to
live at the expense of everybody else." -- Frederic Bastiat
+++++++++++++++ ((lambda (x) (x x)) (lambda (x) (x x))) ++++++++++++++
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