On Thu, Apr 18, 2013 at 10:11 AM, William D Clinger <[email protected]>wrote:
> The Scheme Language Steering Committee (SLSC) is pleased to > request your vote on whether the ninth draft R7RS produced by > Working Group 1 should be endorsed by the SLSC. Your vote is due > by the end of Sunday, May 13, 2013. > Full name (required): Arthur A. Gleckler Location (optional): Sunnyvale, CA USA Affiliation (optional): Google Inc. (but I am voting on my own behalf) Contact details (optional): [email protected] Statement of interest (not required if you registered for the R6RS ratification or the 2009 Steering Committee election): Here's what I wrote in my R6RS voter registration: I've been an avid fan of Scheme since 1984, when I first used it as part of the 6.001 Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs course at MIT. It has been my favorite programming language since then, and while I rarely use it at work, I use it for all my programming projects at home. While I was an undergraduate, a staff member, and a graduate student at MIT [TA-ing 6.001 three times], I spent many years working on MIT Scheme, including its interpreter, compiler, runtime system, debugger, and editor, and I continue to make small contributions in my spare time. I've also spent a lot of time working on my own unfinished implementation of Scheme. I followed the R4RS and R5RS standardization processes closely, participated some in the IEEE Scheme standardization process, and have participated quite a bit by email in the R6RS process. I want to help make sure that R6RS maintains the right balance between the diamond-like jewel Scheme has always been and the practical everyday programming language that we have always wanted Scheme to be. Since then, I voted "yes" on R6RS, and I've been an active member of R7RS Working Group 1 (WG1). Vote (required): yes Rationale (optional): The Steering Committee began the R7RS process by dividing the standard to be written into a "small" Scheme suitable "for use in education, programming-language research, embedded systems, and embedded scripting languages" and a "large" Scheme suitable for large-scale software development. Here are the charters of the working groups for the small and large languages: <http://scheme-reports.org/2009/working-group-1-charter.html> <http://scheme-reports.org/2010/working-group-2-charter.html> Note the emphasis in the charters on making it possible to share code between implementations. I'm a big fan of this division of work, as it will help users of powerful implementations of Scheme written in the spirit of R6RS -- ones that are suitable for real-world, large-scale development -- share code with each other, but it will also help users of much smaller, more special-purpose implementations share code as well, and without burdening them with the enormous implementation effort required by a larger standard. The charters are also designed to ease moving code from small implementations to large ones. I am convinced that the draft is a big step forward, and that it will form an excellent basis for small implementations and for the larger standard that I hope to help write as a member of Working Group 2. The draft includes a simple, static module system that supports loading code defined outside the module declaration and loading code written in case-insensitive R5RS Schemes; a simple and already widely implemented records package; standard support for parameter objects; important data types such as byte vectors; clean support for binary and textual I/O; and numerous other improvements that will help us share code between implementations both small and large. I'm eager to get on with the more exciting work of defining the WG2 standard, where we can draw upon much more of the work done in R6RS and since. I want to help write a Scheme standard that makes it easy to write and share Scheme code that can take advantage of the broad array of language features and libraries needed for writing substantial programs.
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