On 2009-09-08, at 13:02, Alaric Snell-Pym wrote:
I think that most of the effort in porting something between implementations is unnecessary.Now, if two Schemes had taken opposite stances in some deep philosophical debate about, say, how hashtables should be modelled, then I'd be... not exactly ecstatic, but unconcerned about them having different models. I'd see it as a temporary affair, until the great "Is A Hashtable More Like An Alist Or A Procedure" (or whatever) war subsided, and we ended up with one or the other winning, or a sensible way of merging the two views into one appeared. But when they have different ways of accessing the network, different ways of opening a subprocess to run a command, and different ways of structuring my code into separate files and expressing the relationship (so even if I wasn't using such platform-specific features, I'd have unportable code), then it feels like unnecessary work doing the porting.
Agreed, but I long ago learned to create tiny middleware libraries to ease porting problems. So we could paper over the incompatibilities that way, and thus remove ease of porting as a goal of R7RS. Having said that, gratuitous incompatibility helps nobody.
-- v
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