On Sun, 6 Sep 2009, Thomas Lord wrote: > How about this, instead: > > The "small scheme" standard should describe a tiny, > interpreted dialect that is highly reflective and > has a clear and definite semantics. A critical > property of this tiny interpreted dialect is that its > semantics and capabilities are sufficiently rich > that every more conservative Scheme environment can > be modeled in a natural way. > > Then we can do things like formally specify hygienic > macros or modules as programs in that core dialect.
While all this would be very nice as a research project, I doubt that it is a practicable or desirable project for a language standardization committee to undertake. Standardization is not the point to introduce new or largely unknown or untested concepts, or APIs on which no consensus is likely to be attained. As an aside, I have implemented various macro and module systems, with widely varying environment models and representations, in mostly pure R5RS Scheme - as preprocessors that are easily plugged into a REPL or compiler that has the appropriate API exposed, so I know R5RS is pretty much powerful enough in this respect. Andre _______________________________________________ r6rs-discuss mailing list [email protected] http://lists.r6rs.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/r6rs-discuss
