Full name: Per [Magnus Alfred] Bothner Location: Cupertino, California, US.
Affiliation: None relevant. (I'm somewhat affiliated with the GNU project, since Kawa is under the GNU umbrella. My unrelated day job is with Oracle. I certainly speak for neither.) Contact details: [email protected] Statement of interest: Maintainer and primarily implementor of Kawa, which I consider a dialect of Scheme. I've been working on Kawa since 1996. Going back further I have an interest in programming languages, their design, and implementation. Vote: yes Rationale: I was tempted to abstain. I feel some distress at the pro-R6RS/anti-R6RS schism, the incompatibilities between R7RS-small and R6RS, and the natural disappointment of people who worked on R6RS. I think it is unfortunate there was not more effort at unification, but I don't blame anyone. I think the problem with R6RS was not that it was inherently too big though people complained about that. The bigger problem is it was too big a jump from R5RS. There was (in retrospect) too much for people to absorb, and too much to build consensus for in a limited time. In this sense R7RS-small strikes a better balance: Big enough to add most of the more critical improvements people have asked for, without being so big as to scare people off. I just noticed one unresolvable incompatibility with R6RS: (bytevector-copy! bv1 i bv2 j k) In R6RS this copies bv1[i..i+k-1] into bv2[j..j+k-1]. In the draft, it copies bv2[j..k-1] into bv1[i..i+(k-j)-1]. Ouch. OTOH, I think R6RS got this one wrong: Mutable operations in Scheme have the target ("left-hand") value first, and the source ("right-hand") value last. Likewise, I would have preferred to use the R6RS library keywords, and just standardize a subset on the R6RS functionality, even at the risk of some edge-case incompatibility. Bottom line: I think R7RS-small is pretty decent, but I am sad about the schism with R6RS. -- --Per Bothner [email protected] http://per.bothner.com/ _______________________________________________ Scheme-reports mailing list [email protected] http://lists.scheme-reports.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/scheme-reports
