Thomas Lord scripsit: > It was precisely that eerie way in which a tiny core could be extremely > expressive and powerful yet also easy to implement that defined Scheme > from the start. That's the point of Art of the Interperter and Rabbit.
As you doubtless remember, Rabbit provided trival access to every first-order Maclisp function. Indeed, R0RS and R1RS (Rabbit implements almost all of R1RS) don't even list any procedures except a few second-order ones. There was nothing trivial about the Maclisp function set. It isn't till R2RS and the Great Renaming that we get definite decisions about what's in and what's out. R1RS quotes Joel Moses to this effect: "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 a big ball of mud. You can add any amount of mud to it [...] and it still looks like a ball of mud!" The procedure libraries of Scheme are still part of that ball of mud. > In some sense, the standards process went wrong sometime around R3 > or R4. You wildly overstate the differences between R2RS and R3RS. What this amounts to is a back-dated variant of Brian Harvey's famous 1991 line: "Once you let a Standards Committee get at your language, it turns into Pascal" <http://cyber-rush.org/drr/scheme/farm.html>. I submit that RnRS for any n, certainly any n < 6, is *not* Pascal. -- John Cowan [email protected] http://www.ccil.org/~cowan Does anybody want any flotsam? / I've gotsam. Does anybody want any jetsam? / I can getsam. --Ogden Nash, No Doctors Today, Thank You _______________________________________________ r6rs-discuss mailing list [email protected] http://lists.r6rs.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/r6rs-discuss
