On Sat, 2009-09-05 at 01:33 -0400, John Cowan wrote: > 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.
One interesting aspect of the phenomenon to examine is just what portions of the enormous Maclisp function set is needed to implement Rabbit. (A historical curiosity, probably lost in time but maybe GLS can speak to it if he is within airshot - is how exactly the Rabbit Scheme-compiler-in-Scheme was bootstrapped.) > 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. Libraries are not core. It's quite fine to standardize both libraries and core. The structure and function of the core is pretty profound so it serves humanity well to give it its own little description. The conventional name for that description is "Scheme". > > 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. I don't follow you there. I don't have any sense of what you or Brian might mean to indicate in saying "Scheme is Pascal". -t _______________________________________________ r6rs-discuss mailing list [email protected] http://lists.r6rs.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/r6rs-discuss
