[r6rs-discuss] Re: Programs and scripts

From: William D Clinger <will>
Date: Mon Nov 27 13:38:20 2006

I am posting this as an individual member of the Scheme
community. I am not speaking for the R6RS editors.

John Cowan quoting me:
> > Good point. Clearly there are no draft R6RS programs except for scripts
> > plus the libraries they import. By the phrase "real programs", I mean
> > the much larger category of programs that were defined by the R5RS and
> > earlier reports, which some R6RS editors have insisted are not ruled
> > out by the R6RS. I welcome suggestions for a better way to refer to
> > these non-R6RS programs.
>
> I still do not understand. First of all, the standard cannot bind
> anything that does not claim to conform to it, neither a program nor a
> Scheme implementation.

True, but it and we can acknowledge the existence of
programs that do not conform to it. Some of us may
be willing even to acknowledge that not all Scheme
programs conform to it.

> And second, what can one of this "larger category
> of programs" do that cannot be done by a script which imports libraries?

The larger category of programs can use 'x-9 and 'X-9 to
mean the same thing; define new meanings for variables
that have already been defined; use implementation-specific
lexical syntax for such purposes as serialization of records,
control of inlining, and other compiler optimizations; access
libraries written in pre-R6RS Scheme or other languages; load
Scheme code into an interactive read/eval/print loop; et
cetera.

Will
Received on Mon Nov 27 2006 - 13:38:02 UTC