Adrien "Pied" Piérard scripsit: > And then, people try to strangle each other because one does not > dislike unhygienic macros, while another wants case insensitive symbols.
That is a consequence of Parkinson's Law of Triviality, which says that people spend the most time and emotion discussing the smallest issues. Poul Henning-Kamp wrote it up in a famous post <http://tinyurl.com/qw8t> to the FreeBSD mailing list, and from that the behavior is commonly known as "bikeshedding". It's to be expected; if it distresses you, ignore it. > Perhaps am I deeply misunderstanding the potential of the standard, > but I would expect it to be something designed _to_get_things_done. Getting things done, in the sense you mean, has never been the sole purpose of Scheme. Hence the split into small Scheme and large Scheme that will be forthcoming in R7RS. > And to get things done, I need hashtables. I need sockets (or directly > clients for given protocols). I need to be able to run concurrently > two procedures which may do side effects. I need to read and write > files, to move to the end, rewind to the beginning, and insert text in > the middle. And I need them available immediately. Most of these things (but not inserting text into the middle of text files) are available in any substantial Scheme implementation, though not typically in the same way. As a result, the portability of non-trivial Scheme programs between implementations is fairly low, because implementations are really dialects. But since portability *of* implementations is good, the problem is somewhat alleviated. Standardization is more immediately useful for library authors (who want their code to work on any Scheme) than it is for application authors, who can easily pick one implementation and stick with it. -- John Cowan [email protected] http://ccil.org/~cowan This great college [Trinity], of this ancient university [Cambridge], has seen some strange sights. It has seen Wordsworth drunk and Porson sober. And here am I, a better poet than Porson, and a better scholar than Wordsworth, somewhere betwixt and between. --A.E. Housman _______________________________________________ r6rs-discuss mailing list [email protected] http://lists.r6rs.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/r6rs-discuss
