Alaric Snell-Pym scripsit: > Some people say "things should be in the standard because it's > expensive to implement them in a portable manner", an argument I saw > in the threaded started by an email from John Cowan arguing for > including case-lambda and parameters and other such things.
I *deeply* regret ever having said anything of the sort. It was ONLY to explain why I wasn't including such things as SRFI-1, despite it being useful, well-implemented, and well-supported. (I think it's even single-source; has anyone ever built a fresh implementation of SRFI-1 from scratch?) > I think that if useful features *can* be implemented portably in terms > of the standard, they should be left out of the core, but standardised > in an SRFI or the large-scheme standard so that at least they're the > same in all implementations that have them. Implementations that lack > them can use the slow portable implementation. I quite agree. However, sockets or (tiptoeing around the elephant in the room) graphics and GUIs are not the kind of thing that will have slow portable implementations. > I've seen a good argument that it will confuse matters to have too > much optionality; that to be called Scheme, an implementation will > need to contain a rather large set of features (including networking). Hence the two WGs and two languages. > I can see their point - languages like Java, Python and Ruby tend to > have this property Because they are single-sourced. Java has multiple VM implementations, but the class library implementations are tending to converge rather than diverge -- compatibility with Sun's is what matters, and since Sun's are now open-source, implementers tend to use them. > they'll lack sockets and so on, but only until somebody > hooks up an FFI... Hmm, yes. Anyone for writing a SRFI standardizing a C FFI? That was tried, as I recall.... -- John Cowan [email protected] http://www.ccil.org/~cowan Historians aren't constantly confronted with people who carry on self-confidently about the rule against adultery in the sixth amendment to the Declamation of Independence, as written by Benjamin Hamilton. Computer scientists aren't always having to correct people who make bold assertions about the value of Objectivist Programming, as examplified in the HCNL entities stored in Relaxational Databases. --Mark Liberman _______________________________________________ r6rs-discuss mailing list [email protected] http://lists.r6rs.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/r6rs-discuss
