I am posting this speaking for myself, not for the R6RS editors.
dan-r6rs_at_omnigia.com writes:
> just took a look at the R6RS draft, and its size struck me: 142 pages is
> almost three times the R5RS size.
>
> Of course, this is not going to change, as I'm sure every page is the
> result of hard work; but I'm curious, isn't anyone concerned? I remember
> Scheme prided itself on the 50-page spec, and SRFI's used to take up the
> slack in functionality...
I personally am very concerned about the size of the draft, and I'm
sure many other people among the editors and the Scheme community in
general are as well.
I claim that, if the environment that you deal with is Scheme + some
SRFIs, it shouldn't be of great concern to you whether the
functionality in the SRFIs is sitting on srfi.schemers.org or in a
document associated with the R6RS, as long as the additional
functionality is separate from the rest. For reasons clear to most
users of Scheme, the SRFIs are great, but are no substitute for
standard libraries. (And were never intended to be.)
With the R6RS draft, we separated the base library from the other
libraries. The base library is slightly smaller than the language
defined by R5RS, and can be understood and used without the other
libraries. This increases size, but tries to keep complexity at a
reasonable level, preferably not signigicantly higher than that of
R5RS.
I agree that the report draft currently itself isn't as good as it
could be making that distinction clear and easy to understand. I'll
personally try my best to improve that situation. Concrete
suggestions on how to do this would be quite welcome.
--
Cheers =8-} Mike
Friede, V?lkerverst?ndigung und ?berhaupt blabla
Received on Wed Sep 20 2006 - 16:54:33 UTC