[r6rs-discuss] Interpreters need not apply?

From: Aubrey Jaffer <agj>
Date: Sun Feb 25 20:15:25 2007

 | From: William D Clinger <will_at_ccs.neu.edu>
 | Date: Sun, 25 Feb 2007 17:18:55 -0500
 |
 | Pascal Costanza wrote:
 | > Just for clarification: What does it mean that the program is
 | > "not allowed to begin execution"? Does this mean that it would
 | > not be valid to implement R6RS as a plain metacircular
 | > interpreter, without performing some additional syntactic check
 | > beforehand, that is?
 |
 | The language described by the draft R6RS cannot be
 | implemented by a pure interpreter (*). Lexical checking,
 | macro expansion, syntax checking, bound-variable checking,
 | and immutability checks are required before any part of a
 | program can begin its execution.

If what you write is true, then SCM will stay at R5RS. To be sure I
understand, can the language described by R4RS and R5RS be implemented
by a "pure interpreter"?

Because R5RS and R6RS are incompatible, it will cause confusion for
both to be called "Scheme". R6RS having no installed base, it would
cause the least disruption for R6RS to change the name of the language
it defines. How about "Scheme-6"?
Received on Sun Feb 25 2007 - 20:14:37 UTC