At 07:51 AM 8/24/2009, David Rush wrote:
>2009/8/24 Harold Ancell <[email protected]>:
>> At 01:58 AM 8/24/2009, John Cowan wrote:
>>>Adrien "Pied" Piérard scripsit:
>>>> 2009/8/24 John Cowan <[email protected]>:
>>>> > I was thinking about "Diamond" myself.
>> Hmmm, this quote by Joel Moses would seem to be apropos ^_^:
>>
>> "APL is like a diamond. It has a beautiful crystal
>> structure; all of its parts are related in a uniform and
>> elegant way. But if you try to extend this structure in
>> any way - even by adding another diamond - you get an ugly
>> kludge. LISP, on the other hand, is like a ball of
>> mud. You can add any amount of mud to it and it still
>> looks like a ball of mud."
>
>So this is a great time to look at how to *cut* the diamond so it
>looks *even better*.
Yes: dividing "Scheme" into a minimalist core + module system
AKA "small Scheme" and then something built on top of that AKA
"large Scheme" allows for some things in pre-R6RS Scheme to be
profitably moved out of the "diamond" into large Scheme.
One additional wrinkle to this division would be to carefully and
no doubt over time add to small Scheme optional? primitives that
allow reasonably efficient implementation of important features
of large Scheme.
I gather that the IETF's experience with its requirement for working
code suggests that the future Scheme language definition process
would benefit from such a requirement to guide its evolution. That
would then ideally allow one to take a small Scheme with the above
suggested efficiency extensions and add reference libraries to
produce a not terribly painful to use large Scheme.
- Harold
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