The Scheme Steering Committee decided to split the upcoming standard into two languages - a "small" language suitable for education, research, embedded and extensions programming, and a "large" language focused on the practical needs of mainstream software development. The small language has a strong requirement of backwards compatibility with R5RS and IEEE Scheme, while the large language is required to be compatible with the R6RS while maintaining backwards compatibility with the small language.
These are somewhat contradictory goals, but we are doing our best to meet them. Because of the R5RS compatibility requirement, and because those interested in the small language are most likely to be familiar with and favorable towards R5RS, the WG working on the small language decided to base the new report directly on the R5RS, keeping the same overall structure and borrowing ideas and text directly from the R6RS where appropriate. This helps ensure we meet our compatibility requirements and also makes diffs shorter and easier to understand, but increases the chances of our overlooking good changes made in R6RS. We encourage early readers to point out any missing R6RS changes that seem appropriate for a small language, and keep in mind that there will still be a large language upcoming which will include many more features. In light of this, the list of language changes in the draft are described as a diff from R5RS. We will also include a diff between the small language and R6RS as a non-normative appendix. An initial version of this diff is available at: http://trac.sacrideo.us/wg/wiki/WG1vsR6RSDiff Thank you, -- Alex _______________________________________________ Scheme-reports mailing list [email protected] http://lists.scheme-reports.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/scheme-reports
